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Historical Backgrounds 
of the Great War 



THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS 
AND WARNINGS 



BY 

FRANK J. ADKINS 

M.A. St. John's College, Cambridge 



Fas est et ab hoste doceri 



NEW YORK 

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 

J 9i5 



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PREFACE 



This book originated in a series of lectures arranged 
for the Sheffield University War Lectures Com- 
mittee, and for various Relief Committees, Adult 
Schools, Ethical Societies, and similar organiza- 
tions in the Sheffield area. Since they were 
given, however, they have grown so considerably that 
I have thought it better to call them in their present 
form essays rather than lectures, for fear lest any 
reader should imagine that I actually administered 
such masses to my various audiences in lecture form. 
Nevertheless, an occasional colloquialism or repetition 
in the text which I may have not removed may serve 
to indicate the original form of the four essays which 
constitute the book. 

In writing these pages I have aimed rather at 
provoking thought than at imparting exact informa- 
tion ; and if a critical reader undertakes to check 
my statements he will doubtless find the book afford 
him much valuable exercise. Nevertheless, I hope 
that my effort will have achieved its object, which is 
to rouse sufficient interest to make readers of it think, 
and inquire for themselves about the war and its 



6 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

effects. Thought based upon historical fact is the 
best cure for our national vice of muddling through. 

The differences in point of view which exist among 
the combatants, though less tangible to deal with than 
the historic facts which have led to the war, are 
nevertheless too important to be ignored ; and in 
endeavouring to sketch them I have drawn as far as 
I have been able on my personal experiences in 
travel in the lands of all the combatants except the 
Balkan States and Japan. 

Since these essays were written the Board of 
Education has issued its Circular 869 on the Teaching 
of Modern European History, and I was comforted, 
on reading it, to find that I had already anticipated 
in detail its suggestions in the historical framework 
of my book. I therefore venture to hope that the 
essays I have written will prove useful to such of 
my fellow-teachers of history as adopt the Board's 
suggestion " to arrange for special lectures or courses 
of reading suitable even for the younger pupils, 
dealing with the causes and progress of the present 
war." The Board itself admits that " there is not 
available so good a supply of suitable books — either 
books suitable as textbooks for pupils or books of 
reference for use of the masters and to be included 
in the school library — for the latter as there is for 
the earlier period," i.e. from 1871 onwards. I hope 
accordingly that my essays may help to fill the void. 
That they follow the lines of the Circular the follow- 
ing extract from the Circular will, I think, make clear 



PREFACE 7 

to those who read the various essays. " It will be 
possible to point out how the remote past still lives 
in the present : as, for instance, in the existence of 
a debatable territory between France and Germany 
which is ultimately due to the division of the Empire 
of Charles the Great ; the reasons why the Low 
Countries have so often been the seat of war 
between the greater Powers, and the continuity of 
English policy with regard to the independence of 
this district of Europe from the time of Edward I ; 
the reasons for the late organization of Italy and 
Germany as National States ; the fall of Poland ; 
the rise of Russia ; and the historical position of the 
Austrian Monarchy, especially in connection with the 
Mohammedan conquests and the gradual recovery of 
territory from the Turks." It may be too much to 
say, in the words of the Circular, " matters such as 
these naturally arise in the course of any well-directed 
study of English history," but I certainly claim that 
they form the backbone of my essays — and particu- 
larly of the first, on Germany, and the fourth, on 
England and Sea Power. 

F. J. A. 

Sheffield, 

November 1914, 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface . . . . . . .5 

Introduction . . . . . . 13 

FIRST ESSAY 

Germany: Its Growth, Character, and Culture . 27 

SECOND ESSAY 

France : The Pioneer of Civilization . . .105 

THIRD ESSAY 

The Slavs and their Problems .... 145 

FOURTH ESSAY 

England and Sea Power . , . .187 



ENGLAND 

Arise up, England, from the smoky cloud 

That covers thee, the din of whirling wheels : 

Not the pale spinner, prematurely bowed 

By his hot toil, alone the influence feels 

Of all this deep necessity for gain — 

Gain still : but deem not only by the strain 

Of engines on the sea and on the shore, 

Glory, that was thy birthright to retain. 

O thou that knowest not a conqueror, 

Unchecked desires have multiplied in thee, 

Till with their bat wings they shut out the sun : 

So in the dusk thou goest moodily, 

With a bent head, as one who gropes for ore, 

Heedless of living streams that round him run. 

Lord Hanmer. 



INTRODUCTION 

Never has England experienced so sudden and so 
tremendous a change as that which came over her 
in the summer of 191 4. The schools broke up and 
families went off to the seaside in the fine weather 
at the end of July. By the August Bank Holiday 
the State had hold of the railways, all excursions 
were cancelled, a food panic and a money paniG 
with a Bank rate of 10 per cent, had swept over the 
land, flustering though not really shaking our nerves, 
and in short everybody was brought up suddenly by 
the fact that the State— the Government whom in 
happier days we had delighted to abuse— was pos- 
sessed of powers over us and our belongings about 
which we had quite forgotten, if indeed we had ever 
known. 

Our party politics vanished in a night ; the 
Opposition became His Majesty's Opposition indeed ; 
organizations both masculine and feminine which 
had adopted violence for the advancement of their 
respective causes found themselves suddenly changed, 
as if by some magic agency, into armed defenders of 
their common country and resourceful ministrants to 
those who were suffering or about to suffer ; ^ and 
soldiering leaped at once from being an amiable 
weakness of one's neighbour in the Territorials to 
becoming the supreme test of one's manhood. 

Meanwhile a whole series of experiments which 
a month earlier would have caused interminable talk 

13 



14 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

were established by the machinery which some people 
had already looked upon as no longer capable 
of effective action— namely Parliament— in a few 
minutes each. Not only did the State take over the 
railways— so that one could travel on the North 
Western with a Great Central ticket— but it started 
a scheme of Shipping Insurance ; it re-established 
a Press Censorship which had lapsed more than a 
couple of centuries before ; it told people that for 
the time being they need not pay their debts if they 
were of certain kinds ; it turned postal orders into 
currency ; it issued Treasury notes in shoals ; and 
—incredible though it may seem— it actually fixed the 
prices of foodstuffs : thus incidentally revealing the 
smart business man who waits for a rise in price as 
a public enemy and a pest, if not an actual traitor — 
even the Sheffield cutlers and gun -makers reflected 
for a moment on the real significance of their work 
and wondered as to its destination. And yet, in 
spite of the magnitude of these measures, in spite 
of their drastic and far-reaching effect, their enact- 
ment raised hardly a murmur and certainly no oppo- 
sition. There were no cries that the State was going 
beyond its proper bounds ; there were no complaints 
of Socialism rearing its head in our midst (indeed, 
the President of the Anti-Socialist League was among 
the first, I believe, to urge the State to do more than 
it proposed to do for those who were dependent on 
our soldiers). No : we looked on Parliament less 
as the guardian of our liberties than as the rapid 
registrar of expert decrees ; we took these breath- 
less revolutions in our accustomed experience as a 
matter of course ; and in so doing we realized, many 
of us for the first time, the true nature of the State's 
powers and therefore also of the liberty we had 
hitherto enjoyed— namely, that it was, as it were, 
merely what is left over : the residuum of independ- 
ence which the State could afford with safety to leave 



INTRODUCTION 15 

with us under the existing circumstances. It was 
suddenly borne in upon us that the individual has 
no rights as against the State, since apart from 
the State's protection he would have nothing of his 
own — not even his liberty. 

But we were all too excited or anxious to reflect 
and philosophize in this way. Only at a later date 
shall we have the leisure and inclination to return 
in memory to those close -packed days and try to 
extract from them the lessons they contain — unless 
we are too inflated with self -righteousness after the 
war to learn anything at all from it. Those days were 
indeed full of matter for thought — a veritable quarry 
for the student of social and political questions ; 
and I hope that ultimately we shall be able to make 
use of all the experience we have been gaining so 
rapidly since August 1914, before the memory of 
these critical weeks has slipped — like the golden sand 
with which our children were playing at the time — 
through our fingers. 

Now what was it that had caused all this dis- 
turbance and spoilt our holidays? Of course, it was 
the war. The war had swept our interests rudely 
aside, it had pulled the whole of our public life into 
a fresh perspective ; it had made us hesitate about 
our favourite amusements — even football trembled just 
as it was about to re -ascend its throne — it had drawn 
our young men into the Army and threatened a 
dislocation in our industries which dwarfed the effect 
of the biggest strikes of recent years ; it had also 
—per contra — brought suddenly to an end all indus- 
trial disputes. And yet, although we accepted all this 
without a murmur, how many of us knew what it 
was all about? 

We pride ourselves on being a self-governing 
people ; yet the whole course of our Government 
has been deflected, our most -discussed measures 
shelved, the whole of the machinery by which we 



1 6 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

imagine that we direct our own affairs arrested and 
turned to unaccustomed uses— simply because an 
Austrian archduke had been killed in a Balkan town. 
Now, troubles of one sort or another in the Balkans 
are by no means new. Indeed, we had grown quite 
accustomed to them— so accustomed, in fact, that 
many of us doubtless were in the habit of saying 
when we saw in our morning's paper that fighting 
was renewed in that unhappy peninsula : " They're 
at it again, I see," and then of turning to discover 
where our favourite football team was in the League 
or what was the price of our favourite investment. 

_ On this last occasion, however, the matter seemed 
different : it seemed more obstinate, less inclined 
to resolve itself ; and then suddenly, gaining 
momentum with tremendous rapidity, it crashed upon 
us as the awful avalanche of a European war : the 
great war that had been hanging over us for decades, 
the war that some of us had almost ceased to believe 
in, since it had been so often threatened, yet so often 
averted, and above all since it was so terrible to 
think about. 

Fortunately, thanks to the Boer War and its bitter 
lessons, our fighting forces, though small, were well 
prepared ; but if as regards military readiness we 
were not, within our limits, found wanting, never- 
theless on the intellectual side our unpreparedness 
was appalling. As one talked to people about the 
war, or caught fragments of what they were saying 
to each other, one found that practically nobody 
had an adequate idea of what it was all about. After 
the first shock of astonishment had passed, the 
general feeling seemed to be one of resentment that 
so little a State as Servia could set all Europe by 
the ears. Later, it is true, the question of Belgian 
neutrality arose like a rock in the ocean to which 
we could cling ; but even with this basis of reason 
for the war— as far as we English were concerned— 



INTRODUCTION 17 

there still seemed to be a lurking idea in men's 
minds that there must be some larger explanation 
of the war as a whole than had hitherto become 
apparent to them. The rock of Belgian neutrality, 
upon which our peace had been shipwrecked was, 
in short, felt to be but the projecting summit of 
a vast mass, the sides of which sloped down to 
depths unknown to the man in the street. For the 
first time, perhaps, in his experience he realized that 
there were more things in heaven and earth than 
were dreamed of in his philosophy and he was seized 
with a sudden desire to know. The domestic ques- 
tions about which he had been so excited but a few 
short weeks before had suddenly been eclipsed by 
foreign questions about which he knew nothing and, 
as a rule, cared less ; and suddenly he realized that 
the relative importance of these two sets of questions 
had been reversed, that he was not master in his own 
house because he knew too little of the forces at 
work outside his house to gauge, still less to direct, 
them. As a self-governing Englishman, if not as 
'a good European," it behoved him then to get to 
know as soon as might be what he could about this 
alien question which was so rudely upsetting his 
island menage. And so he began to demand 
enlightenment— and enlightenment at express speed 
and with a minimum of the thinking which hurts 
him so and which he regards, with Hamlet, as a 
malady. Unfortunately, however, the information he 
was seeking was not easily peptonized or eyen done up 
in pilulae, for it was nothing less than the history of 
Europe for several centuries past, and any attempt 
to bolt that dish is nearly certain to lead to a mental 
indigestion which will lower, not increase, his fighting 
strength. 

His immediate needs can be supplied only in part ; 
but let us hope that now he has realized the necessity 
for an adequate teaching of history he will see to 



18 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

it that this most vital of all subjects is taught hence- 
forth in such a way as to make it a real source of 
strength and guidance to the democracy in their 
task of ruling both themselves and the Empire. The 
" right little, tight little island/' Alfred -and-the -cakes 
conception of the subject, so favoured by the 
comfortably padded arm-chair historians who rule 
our University Local Examinations, will have to go 
and a more vital, more universal, treatment of the 
subject must take its place. In France, I believe, they 
begin with general history in simple sweeping out- 
line and gradually focus on their own. In England 
we begin by isolating our own history so completely 
that it becomes almost meaningless, and then make 
matters worse by never going beyond the limits of 
our national history textbooks. The ratio as 
between home and foreign affairs must be redeter- 
mined. History per se and apart from our own 
island story must be taught in future, and the subject 
made dynamic by the acknowledgment of those great 
forces of race and economy and religion which mould 
the destinies of men just as rainfall and latitude 
determine the vegetation of any given area of the 
earth's surface. Like the Army, history is neglected 
and ignored in time of peace, and then suddenly 
rediscovered and abused for being inadequate in time 
of war. iWere it not for the experts in both fields, 
who work unrecognized for years, the nation would 
have to pay a heavy price indeed for its neglect of 
these connected factors in national life. 

But teaching alone, however excellent, will never 
give the Englishman that sense of other presences 
which land frontiers and their corollary — conscrip- 
tion — gives to every foreigner. The silver streak 
to which we owe so much is accountable also, of 
course, for our insularity : not only is Great Britain 
an island, but every Briton who lives in it is an island 
as well— self-contained and difficult to approach ; and 



INTRODUCTION I9 

in this double insularity lurks the danger we are 
now facing— the danger of a faulty and imperfect 
realization of the temper and spirit of foreign peoples, 
of their ideals and aims, of a lack of interest in 
foreign affairs and foreign movements generally— the 
danger of the sea change, in short. And, to my mind, 
there is but one effective escape from that danger! 
and that is, foreign travel sensibly undertaken. A 
friend and I went from Sheffield through London and 
Dover to Belgium. We visited Ostend, Bruges, 
Ghent, Brussels, Liege, Dinant, and Namur ; we 
crossed the border and reached Aachen, or Aix-la- 
Chapelle— the run into Germany cost us sixpence 
each— and the whole tour of a week's duration cost 
us less than five pounds each, right back to Sheffield 
again. With this record before him and these figures 
—and we did it quite comfortably ; I understand 
that we spent more than ten shillings each in tips- 
let no comfortably placed clerk or artizan say that 
a foreign tour is beyond his reach ; while as to 
the language, an Englishman gets along somehow 
under all conditions ; and a traveller never can know 
the language of every land he happens to be in— 
sooner or later he is bound to be reduced toj speech- 
lessness. We may, then, hope for great results from 
improved teaching and increased travel (every teacher 
should be made to travel as part of his training) j 
but for the moment our ignorance is a serious handi- 
cap, how serious appears with clearness only when 
we remember the effect of our hesitation after 
Germany had declared war on France and Russia. 
For some days before that declaration there had 
been a strong movement all over England in favour 
of neutrality. That movement collapsed suddenly, 
it is true, as soon as the Germans crossed the Belgian 
frontier ; but the existence of the spirit which 
animated that movement was the chief factor in 
Germany's decision. Germany declared war because 



20 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

our neutrality was virtually assured — to German eyes. 
How great therefore was German surprise and anger 
at the sudden reversal of our national attitude I Can 
we wonder that the Germans thought it was deliberate 
on our part, that, like some of the German troops 
who throw up their hands and so lure our men to 
their death, we had feigned neutrality just to induce 
the Germans to declare war and then turned 
treacherously upon them and joined our Navy to 
the gigantic forces of France and Russia? We did 
nothing of the kind — our hesitation was genuine, not 
feigned, as the Germans, anxious to blame us for 
their misjudgment, believe ; it was the hesitation 
of ignorance, not of design. Yet its effects were the 
same ; and it is at least arguable that our national 
hesitation, born as it was of our national ignorance 
of the matters at issue and of our own past foreign 
policy, was the real cause of the war. If it be; 
suggested that, since the war was bound to come 
sooner or later, the sooner the better and the greater 
the forces opposed to Germany the greater the chance 
of ultimate peace, I am bound to say that such a line 
of argument is Machiavellian and of a sort we should 
expect from Germany rather than from ourselves. 
If good comes out of the evil results of our ignorance; 
we can claim no credit for it. Drift is always dan- 
gerous and undignified, and especially so when it 
is due to ignorance. Quite a modest amount of 
knowledge of German history and ideas would have: 
convinced Englishmen of all that lay behind the 
Kaiser's words and deeds. Nobody who knew any- 
thing of the Napoleonic struggle of the previous 
century could have doubted England's part in the 
war which burst so suddenly over Europe practically, 
on the centenary of Napoleon's defeat at the hands 
of Wellington — and Bliicher ; while the connection 
between England and Belgium is so ancient and of 
such a nature that our intervention can be described, 



INTRODUCTION 21 

as all students of history will acknowledge, only in 
the words of Mr. Bonar Law — words endorsed by, 
Mr. Balfour — at the great Guildhall meeting in 
August 1914, when he said that in the matter of 
Belgium England's honour and England's interest 
went together. These were the most honest words 
on the intervention of England in the land -fighting 
that I have yet heard from a public ma,n: ; they 
convey the teaching of history, and we need not be 
ashamed to confess that our interest as much (as 
our honour is involved in our action. As I heard 
Professor Vinogradoff say lately, " Infatuation and 
insincerity are bound to bring retribution." 

My next reason for believing that an increase in 
our knowledge would be an element of strength in 
our great national effort is this : a short war may 
be fought and won in a burst of sheer enthusiasm ; 
but for a long war other qualities are required. 
The determination that will persevere to the end of 
a long and dragging war, with its. cruel and in- 
evitable losses, is the determination which arises out 
of the conviction that nothing but stern necessity 
and the consequences of failure determine our action ; 
you beat your enemy by studying him and under- 
standing him, as any boxer will tell you. " It's 
dogged that does it " in a long war ; and doggedness, 
if it is not founded on mere stupidity, must be 
founded on a clear vision of the end in view. There 
seems to me something prophetic in the popularity 
of " It's a long way to Tipperary " among our men ; 
and I imagine that the last marches are likely to 
be made in silence. Do we realize yet the significance 
of the single fact, for instance, that the women of 
South Germany have forced reluctant officials to 
accept their golden ornaments? " Gold is always 
wanted in war-time," they say ; and they would feel 
ashamed to flaunt it in time of national extremity 
for mere ostentation. 



22 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Of all the lines in our patriotic minstrelsy the 
one we shall need most in the long run will not be 
" Britons never shall be slaves," but a line from 
another nautical song, " Hearts of Oak," and that 
line is, " Steady, boys, steady ! " and, to me at any, 
rate, the steadiness, the ballast we need to keep us 
on an even keel amidst the gales and billows of 
this tempest of war, is as much history as we can 
intelligently take on board. Hence my reasons for 
the mainly historical line I shall take in this series 
of essays. The thrills we get from the detailed 
fighting, the heroism of our soldiers and sailors, 
are, after all, only the last moves in the long game 
of chess that has been played for years previous 
between the various Chancelleries of Europe. Just 
as artillery and rifle fire itself only prepares the 
way for the bayonet charge, so do diplomatic notes 
and telegrams in their turn prepare the way for the 
artillery. All focuses on the bayonet ; but behind 
the soldier is the diplomatist. 

Another reason for spreading knowledge in time 
of war — especially historical knowledge — is its harden- 
ing effect, its killing out of the sentimentality in 
which we usually soak ourselves. We are so unused 
to the horrors of war that they make us sick ; we 
try to escape the very thought of them. But nausea 
has to be overcome, for it is akin to panic. The 
young surgeon cannot afford to have his nerve shaken 
by the blood and the reek when he is in the middle 
of his first operation ; and so must it be with us 
who are an unblooded generation. The English fox- 
hunter wipes the bleeding stump of the fox's tail 
across the face of the boy or girl he has taken to 
hounds for the first time ; and thus they are 
"blooded." Now some such blooding seems to be a 
national necessity for us, and history provides it, as, 
for instance, in the details of Agincourt. Nelson was 
always seasick for the first few days of a voyage ; 



INTRODUCTION 23 

but he had overcome his weakness by the day of 
battle. As with Nelson, so with his fellow-country- 
men. Given time, they recover ; but there is always 
an anxious period of readjustment which a people 
with a better mental preparation for war escapes. 
We find it harder than they to face the harsh neces- 
sities for war : to think, for instance, of a bayonet 
being used for killing men during the daytime and 
for toasting a steak cut from a horse killed in action 
after the fight is over ! We shrink from the dilemma 
produced by the use of non-combatants as a shield 
for the enemy's advance, even though the women 
so used call on the Allied troops to shoot ; we do 
not rise at once to the height of the old Scotch 
couplet : — 

He who fights and runs away 
Lives to fight another day, 

when the fate of cruisers is in the balance ; and 
the Admiralty has had to remind its captains of the 
principle contained in Stevenson's pirate song, 
'* Time for us to go," even when a consort is sinking. 
We are apt to think seriousness and a sense of 
responsibility, especially in the young, a sign of prig- 
gishness, and are unable to realize that Nelson's mid- 
shipmen at the age of thirteen or so could not only 
bring a prize across the Atlantic and beat off Spanish 
attacks on her, but could also write home in this 
strain on the death of Nelson : " But, Britons, still 
be joyful. Cease to weep. Do not give way to 
unmanly pleasures. I do not mean to say, Care 
not for his death, but regret it in a manly manner."' 
We like our boys to be boyish and believe — quite 
rightly — in slow development ; but we are also apt 
to forget that development may be so slow as to 
be inappreciable ; and we have too many adults 
among us who are merely old boys and not men at 



24 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

all in any real sense — people who make the mock- 
virtue of mock-modesty an excuse for shirking 
responsibility ; people whose chief aim is to be lost 
in the crowd and exactly like everybody else ; people 
who solace themselves with the dangerous half-truth 
that they will learn to command merely by learning 
to obey. We are, in short, apt to be soft in the 
first stages of war, and it is largely by envisaging the 
facts which history reveals that we grow hardened 
to its horrors ; and can at last accept the great 
words of Cromwell when he said : " Being denied 
just things, we thought it our duty to get that by the 
sword which was not to be got otherwise — and this 
hath ever been the spirit of Englishmen." 

Let us now try to imagine ourselves at the point 
when victory has been achieved, peace signed, and 
normal life resumed. With a sigh of relief the 
Englishman will relapse into his earlier rut ; he 
will forget all about the war as speedily as ever, 
he can ; he will shut out from his mind and 
memory the picture of a ravaged continent ; the 
details and actualities he was forced to face during 
the war will soon become faint and blurred ; he 
will forget the geography the war has taught him ; 
he will gratefully look on life once more from his 
cosy little island standpoint, and thank Heaven it 
is no longer necessary to pretend to understand the 
French or the Russians, Bernhardi, Nietzsche, or 
Treitschke. He can sweep all such harsh names, all 
such nebulous ideas from his mind at the same time 
that he finally abandons the attempt to pronounce 
the names of Polish fortresses ; and he can once 
more revel with a good conscience in the blessings 
of peace, which mean to him a resumption of the 
daily service along the well-worn tram-lines of his 
accustomed life with nothing in particular to think 
about. Happy in his escape from the unaccustomed 
regions into which the war has led him, he soon 



• INTRODUCTION 25 

sinks — if he is true to his own past — into the dan- 
gerous state in which earlier realities have ceased to 
be real, earlier dangers have become merely the 
bogies of the alarmist or else of the professional 
man with an axe to grind, earlier precautions simply 
the wasteful extravagance of a more barbarous and 
brutal age. Intent once more on his business — the 
true end of man — he will tend only too quickly to 
forget all that the war has taught him ; and if such 
be the case even with the generation which lived 
through the actual period of the fighting,, how much 
more will it be true of the next and succeeding 
generations ! How, then, are we to protect posterity, 
from this gradual descent into unreality, which is 
the greatest peril of our insular position — a peril from 
which continental peoples are preserved by the con- 
tinual presence of armed forces across their frontiers? 
Surely, by a real study of our past wars and the 
effects of them. Even the far-distant story of Ethel- 
red the Unready, of the decay of the Navy, of the 
massacre of the Danes in 1002 — an Anglo-Saxon 
alternative to our present-day spy-removing— the sub- 
sequent conquest of England by the Danes, have 
a direct message to us to-day. Ignorant contempt, 
again, for the Normans was largely responsible for 
the Conquest of 1066 ; and so we could go on. 
Each conquest, each shock, produces a more or less 
transitory change in England, by breaking into the 
charmed circle in which she lives and reminding her 
of the existence of the foreigner. We remember for 
a moment that national existence may be a struggle 
even for us ; and then we forget. But unless we 
learn to remember, unless we open our minds to 
the invasion of facts and ideas from our own past 
and from abroad, we may even yet have, once again, 
some day, unwillingly to open our land to the in- 
vader in arms. 

Lastly, when this war is brought to a close 



26 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

the question of settlement will arise, and the 
settlement reached will represent the equilibrium, 
not only of the forces at present contending 
against each other, but also of the different 
factors on the winning side. The terms of the 
victors, that is to say, will represent the views 
that the victors hold. Now I do not expect any 
great diversity among these views ; indeed, it is quite 
clear there will be considerable agreement. Never- 
theless it will be well for the voice of Britain to be 
as strong and as clear as possible in the enunciation 
of her views, and if our voice is to be strong and 
clear our thinking must be strong and clear before 
we can express ourselves. Now we cannot possibly 
think out effectively what sort of a settlement we wish 
our Ministers to insist upon unless we are acquainted 
with the main facts at least of the European position. 
Our weight in the counsels of the Allies depends, 
that is to say, not only on the size of our Expedi? 
tionary Force and the strength of our Navy, but also 
on the clearness and vigour of our views. Therefore 
hard thinking based on knowledge of the historical 
facts is as real an element of strength to us as are 
howitzers and machine-guns. A patient study of 
the roots of the war will in the fullness of time enable 
us to gather the ripe fruits of the war. 



THE WAR : ITS ORIGINS 
AND WARNINGS 

FIRST ESSAY 

GERMANY: ITS GROWTH, CHARACTER, 
AND CULTURE 

I 

GROWTH 

A Radical is a man who professes to get to the roots 
of things ; he claims that action can be effective 
only when it is based upon thorough knowledge ; 
and, whether we call ourselves Radicals or not, we 
must all acknowledge that, in the matter of this 
war at least, an effective understanding, so neces- 
sary to effective action — and effective settlement at 
the end — is to be obtained only by getting back to the 
beginning — to the root of the whole matter. 

Let us plunge, then, boldly into the past : let us 
press back in thought till we come to a satisfactory 
starting-point. If we do so, where shall we find 
it? At nothing more recent than the year 410 A.D. 
And why there? Because it was in that year that 
Rome fell — or rather silted up — and the Dark Ages 

began to cloud over Europe, and enfolded it for the 

27 



28 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

next four centuries. Let us say rather, Western 
Europe, since the Eastern section of the old Roman 
Empire, the Balkan Peninsula, with its capital, Con- 
stantinople, did not fall. Indeed, the great city on 
the Bosphorus remained " the Bulwark of the West " 
in even a truer sense than Venice for over a thousand 
years — till 1453 indeed ; and her fall in that year 
before the Turks, so far from being followed by a 
darkening and dimming of civilization such as had 
followed the decay of Rome a thousand years earlier, 
set the torch 1 to that great flame we call the 
Renaissance. 

Here, then, we have two centres : Rome falling in 
410 ; Constantinople resisting till 1453 ; and we 
have the Dark Ages hiding everything from view in 
the West for a matter of four hundred years from 
410. Yet not quite everything. There are at least 
two movements we ought to mention. The Kaiser 
told his troops going to China to emulate the deeds 
of the Huns under Attila. Now Attila and the Huns 
belong to these very Dark Ages we are thinking 
about. Attila called himself Flagellum Dei (" the 
Scourge of God ") ; he led his followers in about the 
year 450 from the south of Russia — they say their 
god showed them the ford over the Don by taking 
the form of a stag they were hunting — across Europe 
till he nearly reached the North Sea. His soldiers 
struck terror into the peoples they encountered. Con- 
temporaries describe them as dwarfish warriors of 
Eastern type whose legs were bowed with constant 
sitting on horseback. They were mere destroyers, 
and having been defeated at Chalons (so near the 
centre of much of the fighting of the present war), 
their menace faded, and they became but a memory 
in Europe. Yet two races we shall have to refer to 
later have apparently some kinship with these 
nomadic marauders of the Dark Ages, and these 
are the partners of the Austrians in the Dual 



GERMANY 29 

Monarchy, the Hungarians and the Finns, a people 
once subject to Sweden, now subject to Russia, who, 
in their land immediately to the east of St. Petersburg 
— I should have said Petrograd — have developed very 
considerably. They even have lady Members of 
Parliament ! 

The other people we must mention in these four 
centuries are much more important to our story. 
So far from fading away as the Huns did, they 
remain a permanent factor in world history. About 
the year 600 a.D. Mohammed arose and set in motion 
for the spread of his warlike faith all the energy and 
enthusiasm of the most energetic people in the world, 
the Arabs. His teachings were simple. They remind 
us of the Old Testament ; they inculcate the same 
belief in One God who actively leads His chosen 
people by Vicegerents or Judges into a promised 
land and breaks thei heathen to their service. 
Mohammed's marching orders to his religious fanatics 
are simple. They are to take no wine, and if possible 
they are to get killed in battle — for death in the cause 
of their faith assures their entry into heaven. 
To-day this desire for a fighting martyr's death is 
as strong as ever, and even the constant wars in 
which the Mohammedans are engaged do not pro- 
vide all the opportunities devout Mussulmans require, 
so once a year, in a bloodstained procession through 
the streets of Stamboul, they cut themselves with 
knives like the priests of Baal in the days of Elijah 
and hope to die from their wounds. 

The fighting force of these fanatics is a momentous 
factor in world politics, as we shall see presently^ 
We rely on it very largely in India ; we felt its force 
in the Khyber, and again in Egypt and the Soudan., 
At Omdurman, for instance, where Kitchener was in 
command, the Khalifa's men came on and on till the 
last was shot down by our machine-guns a few yards 
from our lines. There was no retreating when a 



3 o THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

certain percentage of the men had fallen as there is 
among civilized troops. The sword, then, spread 
Islam with the greatest rapidity, and spread it in two 
directions : one North-Eastward till it had penetrated 
the heart of Asia and converted the wandering Turks, 
cousins of the Huns ; the other Westward through 
Egypt and North Africa, then across the Straits of 
Gibraltar into Spain, where a State was planted which 
continued practically till the days of Christopher 
Columbus to uphold the Crescent in the West. This, 
then, is the position. In the midst of the Dark 
Ages Europe is threatened by Islam from two direc- 
tions. Like an immense pair of pincers, the 
Mohammedans were closing in from East and West. 
In the East they were held at bay for eight centuries 
by Constantinople ; in the West they were cutting 
deeper and deeper into the Continent, for in the West 
there was at first nothing to stop them. 

But at last they found a resistance. Among the 
people who had drifted into the decaying Empire of 
Rome were the Franks. They had crossed the Rhine 
and conquered the old Roman province of Gaul, which 
henceforth became Frankland or France. The 
Franks were thus a German race, and they stretched 
eastward to the Elbe — the river that empties itself 
into the North Sea just by Hamburg at the base of 
Schleswig-Holstein, the isthmus which leads up to 
Denmark — and westward as far as the Mohammedan 
Moors, who had already crossed the Pyrenees from 
Spain, would allow them to extend. On this western 
frontier, then, the critical struggle must take place, 
and it occurred when the Moors tried to capture the 
shrine of St. Martin at Tours on the Loire — one of 
the richest shrines in Europe — but were broken by 
the Frankish king, Charles the Hammer, who defeated 
them in one of the decisive battles in the world's 
history, namely, at Poictiers, in 732. This is the 
Great Poictiers ; there is a Little Poictiers : a local 



GERMANY 31 

struggle between English and French of which we 
make a good deal ; but this occurs several cen- 
turies later, during our first Hundred Years' War 
with France. 

The Moslem pincers had then been stopped — East- 
ward by Constantinople, Westward by Charles Martel. 
His son, Pepin the Short, and his grandson, Charles 
the Great or Charlemagne, pushed their conquests 
farther and farther South till in the days of Charle- 
magne the Franks ruled from the Ebro — or at least 
from the Pyrenees — to the Elbe — a vast Empire in- 
deed for those days. And now we come to the most 
striking part of the story. During the whole of 
this Dark period the old capital city, Rome, had 
been in decay. Threatened again and again by bar- 
barians, she had more than once found safety and 
protection in the courage of the head of the Christian 
Church in Rome — the Pope. But the Pope, con- 
tinually harassed as he was, felt that if only he 
could gain a champion to fight his battles he could 
devote himself all the more whole-heartedly to his 
real work of spreading the kingdom of God. Par- 
ticularly was he in need of protection from the 
Lombards, a German tribe who had settled in Italy. 
And it was to gain safety from these that he made 
Charlemagne a most flattering offer : if he would 
come to the rescue of the Holy See and subdue th.3 
Lombards, he should be crowned Emperor in St. 
Peter's. 

Charlemagne did not hesitate an instant. Adding 
at Milan the iron crown of Lombardy to the Frankish 
crown he already wore at Aachen, he marched on 
to Rome, and there, on Christmas Day in the year 
800, he received at the Pope's hands an Imperial 
crown. 

Here, then, is a transformation. Out of the murk 
and confusion of the Dark Ages a new Empire 
emerges four centuries after the fall of the old.. 



32 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

When the old Empire fell, its spirit, the Church, 
lived disembodied and in constant danger of ex- 
tinction through a perilous four centuries. Now, 
however, it had taken to itself another body ; and 
thus the defender of Christendom in the West, the 
Frank King of Aachen, becomes first King of Lom- 
bardy, and then head, with the Pope— for it was 
a double sovereignty— of the Holy Roman Empire. 

Let us now look for a moment at this new Empire 
and compare it with the old. In the first place it 
is much smaller. It includes only Gaul, a strip of 
Spain, and part of Italy. The whole of the East, 
the region of Constantinople, is beyond its control, 
and, indeed, rather contemptuous of it. But, on the 
other hand, it contains areas never ruled at all hy 
Rome. All beyond the Rhine to the Elbe— at the 
mouth of which Charlemagne founded Hamburg to 
keep off the Danes — was land which had never 
acknowledged the rule of Rome. 

Then let us see how the two differed in civiliza- 
tion. Although much of the learning and culture 
of Rome had been kept alive by the Roman Church— 
whose language even to-day is the Latin of Old Rome 
—yet the work of spreading enlightenment among 
the newly planted barbarians, Goths, Vandals, and 
others, was necessarily slow ; and Charlemagne him- 
self was practically illiterate. It is said that he 
kept writing materials beside his bed, so that if he 
were sleepless at night he could sit up and practise 
his letters. What a contrast to an Emperor-scholar 
like Marcus Aurelius ! Yet it must not be thought 
that Charlemagne disdained learning. He was, 
indeed, fully alive to its value, and brought learned 
Englishmen like Alcuin from the Northumbrian 
monasteries of Tyne, Tees, and Wear to teach his 
subjects. English influence is thus very ancient in 
Germany. Alcuin may be regarded perhaps as the 
forerunner of Shakespeare in this respect. Nor was 



GERMANY 33 

his reign a secluded one. He was in touch with 
Haroun al-Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad (we shall 
come across Bagdad in a very different connexion 
presently), the hero of the Arabian Nights, and his 
cathedral at Aachen is built on Byzantine or Con- 
stantinople lines. Such, then, was the first Holy 
Roman Emperor. The history of the Empire as a 
whole is best read in Bryce's great book. All I can 
do is to pick out such points in its history — it was 
destroyed by Napoleon — as affect my immediate 
purpose. 

Theoretically the position of Emperor was elective. 
The various princes of the Empire were supposed 
to, meet on the death of the Emperor and choose one 
of their number in his place (hence their title of 
Elector^), just as the Cardinals meet in conclave 
on the death of a Pope to choose a Cardinal to suc- 
ceed him. (I was present in Rome during the eight 
days of the election of Pius X in 1903.) But in 
practice the tendency was to elect the son of the 
former Emperor ; and thus we get the great ruling 
houses which kept the Imperial office in their grasp 
for generations, as, for instance, the Hohenstaufen, 
and later the Hapsburgs — a name which brings us 
up, indeed, to the present day, for the Hapsburgs are 
still ruling in their ancient Archduchy of Austria. 
We might, indeed, say that the old Emperor of 
Austria is the real Emperor ; some people would, 
in fact, be inclined to call him the Emperor, and 
leave out the words " of Austria " altogether, since 
he is the heir to the Empire of the days when 
there was but one Imperial throne — that of the Haps- 
burgs, when the Emperor of Russia was still buried 
in the interior of his vast territories at Kieff or 
Moscow, and when the Emperor of Germany was 
simply Elector of Brandenburg or King of Prussia. 
But we are running ahead too fast. 

The Empire of Charlemagne soon broke up. His 

3 



34 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

grandsons divided it among them at Verdun in 843 
(Verdun is one of the great frontier fortresses of 
France to-day), and the way in which they divided 
it is interesting and important. Charles took West 
Frankland or old Gaul, and from this grew slowly 
modern France. Ludwig took East Frankland or 
Germany, which remained a patchwork of electorates, 
duchies, prince-bishoprics, and so on — some so small 
as to have an army of no more than half a dozen 
privates and four officers — right up into the nine- 
teenth century. But most interesting of all is the 
portion of Charlemagne's eldest grandson. It in- 
cluded, as one might expect, the two capitals Aachen 
and Rome, and all the land in between, the Nether- 
lands, Luxemburg, Alsace-Lorraine, Switzerland, 
Lombardy, and, since his name was Lothar, it was 
called Lothar's Kingdom, or Lothringen, or — in 
French — Lorraine. Now here at last is a word to 
fire our interest ! It is the key to more European 
history, to more of the present war, than can easily 
be told. Suffice it, then, to say that Lothar's portion, 
lying as it did between France and Germany, and 
belonging to neither, became a bone of contention, a 
source of trouble from the day of its foundation to 
the present moment. At one point in its history it 
nearly rises to the dignity of a separate kingdom — as 
all who have read Sir Walter Scott's " Quentin 
Durward " and remember the long struggle between 
Louis XI and Charles the Bold (who ruled in 
Brussels) will remember. But Charles was too bold 
(he ought properly to be called M the Rash "), ; he 
attempted to conquer the unconquerable Swiss. He 
was killed in battle, and his dreams of sovereignty 
passed, while the foxy Louis — son of the King whom 
Joan of Arc had crowned in the Cathedral of Reims 
(long before Prussian shells were thought of), — 
profited by his death to secure for ever the supremacy 
of the French Crown. Henceforth Lorraine belongs 



GERMANY 35 

sometimes to Germany, sometimes to France ; it 
was French up to 1870, and then the Germans took 
it. But to-day, in Paris, may be seen in the Place 
de la Concorde, among the statues of the cities of 
France, the statue of Strasburg, the capital of 
Lorraine. It was covered with mourning wreaths 
till the war began ; but still on its pedestal there 
is, I believe, a vacant space — a space whereon shall 
be cut at a future date the year of its recovery : — 

Lost 1870. 
Regained . 



Thus we see the continuity of history. To under- 
stand the question of Lorraine we have to enter into 
the counsels of Charlemagne's grandson ; we have 
to go back a thousand years ; and we may also allow 
ourselves to look forward into the future to fill in 
a vacant space on a statue in Paris. 

We are now gradually concentrating on our subject. 
The Frank Empire has gone ; France has broken 
from it and is living her own life ; Lorraine pursues 
her uneasy and undetermined course immediately to 
her eastern flank, and to the east again — to the 
east of Lorraine, that is to say — we at last see 
Germany. 

And it is with Germany that we are most im- 
mediately concerned. I have already referred to the 
patchwork character of this area ; but I wish now 
to emphasize this fact : the patches are of varying 
size and importance. Some are almost micro- 
scopically small : Weimar in the days of Goethe 
raised a few hundred men as its army ; others — 
Austria, for instance — are powerful enough to claim 
a more or less continuous leadership and to mono- 
polize the Imperial throne ; others again, though still 
called electorates, will one day become kingdoms — 
e.g. Hanover, Saxony, Bavaria, Wurtemburg. There 



36 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

is, however, one electorate in particular to which I 
wish to draw attention, and that is the electorate of 
Brandenburg. 

Now recently I had the curiosity to visit Branden- 
burg. It lies about thirty miles to the west of Berlin, 
but beyond a great stone Roland that stands up, 
some thirty feet high, from the middle of the pave- 
ment in front of the Town Hall, there is practically 
nothing of interest ; I believe, however, that it is 
noted for its hams. Yet this little town, quiet and 
empty as it now appears on the Havel, with its vast 
barges moving continually to and fro, is a seat and 
centre of world importance, for it is nothing less than 
the empty shell of the egg from which was hatched 
that ferocious eagle whose beak and claws are at 
the present moment tearing Europe. 

The ruler of Brandenburg was also head of an 
order of crusading knights, the knights of the 
Teutonic order. But these crusaders did not waste 
their energies on the Turks and infidels of the Holy 
Land ; they were more interested in the heathen to 
the east of them — the Prussians. These Prussians were 
subdued — whether they used Prussian blue as our 
own ancient Britons used woad I cannot say, but they 
were an equally primitive people — and they gradually 
disappeared under the rule of the Brandenburg 
knights. Indeed, according to the French historian 
Lavisse in his wonderful little " Vue generale de 
Thistoire de l'Europe," there is no such people as 
the Prussians, they are really all Brandenburgers, 
just as the Britons who " never shall be slaves " are, 
as a matter of fact, mainly Anglo-Saxons — that is, 
low Germans. The extension of Brandenburg east- 
wards over Prussia meant a great increase in its 
importance and influence among its German neigh- 
bours, and that importance and influence was still 
further increased by events which, occurring farther 
south — in the Mediterranean region, in fact — com- 



GERMANY 37 

pletely altered the history and destinies of Europe. 
We must therefore break off our story of Branden- 
burg for a while — but not for long— to see what 
those fateful events were. 

The thousand years of Constantinople's resistance 
were at an end. Whereas Rome fell before the Bar- 
barians in 410, Constantinople fell before the Turks 
in the middle of the fifteenth century. Into the full 
effects of that great catastrophe we cannot pretend to 
enter ; they will be dealt with again in the third 
essay. All I have time to say now is that the great 
revival of learning which resulted from the fall of 
Constantinople led to yet another revival of the utmost 
importance — a revival in religion : the Reformation. 
Now the leader of this movement was, of course, the 
German Luther, and the effect of his work was not 
only to split Christendom into warring sections and 
thus destroy the mediaeval unity of Europe, but to split 
the Empire also into Protestant and Catholic Powers, 
which, like the soldiers of the dragon's teeth, fought 
each other till they could fight no longer. The war 
was known as the Thirty Years War and ravaged 
Germany during the days of our James I, who did all 
he could to stop it, and his son, Charles I. At its 
close the population of Germany was half what it had 
been at its beginning, and whole tracts that had been 
fruitful farmland before the war had reverted to their 
original forest condition when the Treaty of West- 
phalia brought the war to a close in 1648. Yet the 
war had done one thing. Luther had been forced to 
look for support against Pope and Emperor among 
the princes of northern Germany and the Baltic 
region, who were strengthened in consequence in 
their idea of Divine Right : thus it came about that 
the Reformation gave Brandenburg still further op- 
portunities of development on lines more or less in- 
dependent of the Empire. At any rate, it is just 
about 1650 that we come upon the name of the real 



38 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

founder of Brandenburg's greatness, the Great 
Elector as he is called, who ruled from 1640 to 1688. 
He it was — his name was Frederick William — who 
brought Brandenburg nearer Prussia by capturing the 
province which lay between the two, Pomerania, and 
thus at a stroke multiplied the significance of his 
electorate. Indeed, the word Brandenburg is already 
becoming too small for such an ambitious and enter- 
prising State, and it is not long, only a few years, 
indeed, after the death of the Great Elector — in 1701, 
to be quite correct — that the change comes, and the 
simple Electorate of Brandenburg blossoms forth as 
the Kingdom of Prussia. Curiously enough, thirteen 
years afterwards its western neighbour, the Elector 
of Hanover, also became a king, for in 1 7 1 3 he 
ascended the throne of England as George I. 

When we find ourselves free to talk of the King of 
Prussia we feel that we are beginning to make head- 
way ; and, indeed, Prussia herself helps us by forging 
ahead more rapidly during the next half-century than 
she had ever done before. The second King of 
Prussia had a mania for soldiering ; he increased his 
forces from 38,000 to 83,000 men, and his chief 
delight was to drill and parade them. To provide 
the money they required, he fed his Court on boiled 
mutton and the plainest of food generally, while his 
Giant Guards (" The Romance of a Regiment," by 
J. R. Hutchinson, gives their complete history) were 
the talk of Europe. I am not certain, but I can quite 
imagine that it was this King who introduced the 
goose-step into the Prussian Army — that parade 
march which so astonishes those who see it for the 
first time ; its stiffness and perfect uselessness exactly 
fit his character. A good deal about him is to be 
found in Macaulay's lively Essay on Frederick the 
Great ; he it was who exalted the military nature 
of the Prussian kingship, who sacrificed everything 
for military power and who seemed to think only in 



GERMANY 39 

terms of soldiers. Voltaire was indeed right when he 
said: " War is the industry of Prussia." Yet he 
made no real use of his forces. That was the destiny 
of his son, Frederick the Great, the most important 
name we have hitherto, come across. As a young 
man he quarrelled violently with his father, who once 
tried to strangle him with the window cords ; more 
than once he went into banishment, but usually 
managed to, soften his father's heart by picking up 
some alien giant and packing him off as a peace-offer- 
ing to Berlin. At this period Frederick was, in short, 
not in sympathy with the Prussian Court ; its life 
seemed narrow and cramped to him, and he preferred 
the more brilliant life of the French. 

When, however, he succeeded to the throne he 
became the real upbuilder of Prussia, and his method 
of establishing the greatness of his own realm is 
best expressed in his own words, " He is a fool," he 
says, " and that nation is a fool, who, having the 
power to strike his enemy unawares, does not strike 
and strike his deadliest." Such was his amiable 
policy ; and he was not long in acting on it, for he 
was possessed of real military genius. The throne 
of Austria was occupied by a woman, Maria Theresa. 
So, without the shadow of an excuse, Frederick in- 
vaded the territories of his neighbour and tore Silesia 
from her — this in the War of the Austrian Succession, 
which kept, with its sequels, Frederick, Prussia, 
Europe, and, indeed, even distant India and North 
America, in a turmoil for a quarter of a century from 
1740. Silesia is that part of Germany which is in 
between Poland and Bohemia, the valley of the Upper 
Oder, with Breslau as its capital, and stretching to 
the south-east of Berlin. He also began to carve up 
the defenceless and divided kingdom of Poland and 
share it with his neighbours, Russia and Austria ; 
though his taking of West Prussia from Poland is 
perhaps less blameworthy than his attack on Silesia, 



40 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

since it was already largely German and lay between 
his eastern and western dominions. 

The lead Prussia thus established in Germany was 
emphasized by the smallness of many of the other 
independent States. A kingdom whose ruler lived — 
one might say even slept — in uniform, and which 
could place nearly a hundred thousand men in the 
field was bound to dominate States whose armies 
reached only a few hundreds, as was the case of 
Weimar, even a few scores or merely a dozen or so, as 
was the case with still smaller States. The shoulder- 
to-shoulder style of fighting, the solid column which, 
in its forward march, reminded onlookers of the 
Roman Legion or the Greek Phalanx, the order to 
reserve fire until the whites of the enemy's eyes were 
visible, the straight line which the " dashing white ser- 
geant " produced by passing his pike horizontally along 
the backs of his privates — all these are characteristic 
features of the Prussian Army of the period, and of 
much later periods, even, to some extent, down to 
the present day, when the German regiments carry 
their colours into battle. But the Prussian soldier, 
the Pomeranian Grenadier, has not always tramped 
solidly to victory through the enemy's lines, and 
before long Prussia, fine fighting Power though she 
had proved herself to be when led by the genius of 
Frederick the Great, was tasting the bitterness of 
defeat. 

I must leave my chief reference to the French 
Revolution, which broke out only a few years after 
the death of Frederick the Great, till my essay on 
France. All I can say about it here is as regards 
its effect on Prussia. The Prussian King wished to 
help restore the Bourbons to the throne, and to 
that end he marched his dense columns against the 
new Republic. But his serried ranks were powerless 
against the frantic artillery fire of those ill-equipped 
sans-culottes of Dumouriez, who blew the supporters 



GERMANY 41 

of the exiled Bourbons to pieces from the tableland of 
Valmy on September 20, 1792, a tableland that has 
been prominent also in the fighting of September, 
1 91 4 — the plateau of Argonne : the chopping -block 
whereon the French dismember the Barbarians. 
The Prussians have learnt nothing — at least in the 
way of open-order fighting. The Argonne has seen a 
second Valmy, with British rifles doing the work of 
Dumouriez' cannon, and Chalons, where Attila was 
defeated, is near by. 

Nor was Valmy the extent of the damage which 
Prussia suffered at the hands of the Revolution. 
When Napoleon, with the military genius which has 
always appealed to the French spirit, organized the 
Revolution and drove French armies over the Con- 
tinent like ploughs to break up the crusted 
monarchies of his day and give an opening for the 
seeds of freedom, Prussia suffered more than any 
other German State. At Weimar, Napoleon gave a 
theatrical performance to " a pitful of kings " ; one 
of the sentries outside the theatre was reprimanded by 
his sergeant for giving the Imperial salute to a Ger- 
man royalty. " He is only a king," said the sergeant. 
During these days at Weimar, Napoleon tried to urge 
Goethe to write a play on the greatness of Caesar as 
an offset to Shakespeare's tragedy, which turns merely 
on Caesar's death. In short, Napoleon was lording 
it pretty imperially over the Germans he had just 
beaten at Jena. But all this was mild as compared 
with the treatment he meted out to Prussia (the ex- 
champion fighter of Europe). As we go through the 
Sans-Souci Palace at Potsdam to-day the guide calls 
our attention to the writing-desk of Frederick the 
Great, and as we look at it we notice that the leather 
covering has been partly ripped off. When we ask 
how this piece of destruction occurred, we are told 
that it is the work of Napoleon himself, who carried 
off the leather he had thus torn away as a memento 



42 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

of the soldier he so much admired. His treatment 
of Prussia generally is on a par with this piece of 
high-handedness ; and, indeed, Queen Louisa went 
so far as to wait on him and beg him to show some 
consideration for her stricken people. Hardy, in 
his " Dynasts/' has a vivid picture of the meeting, 
and, indeed, of many another incident of these stir- 
ring days. 

But there is a tide in the affairs of men, and 
Napoleon in his turn was forced back. He had been 
obliged to attempt an impossible task — the task of 
conquering Russia, the impenetrable. Why he was 
compelled to -undertake this impossibility we shall 
learn later. Suffice it for the present, then, to say 
that the capture of Moscow, so far from ending the 
Russian war with a French victory, led only to 
Napoleon's own undoing, since no capital is worth 
entering so long as an army unbeaten is in the field. 
Rolled back across the Russian frontiers, he found 
himself in hostile Germany, and was again defeated 
in the Battle of the Nations at Leipsic, in October, 
1 8 13, where Russians and Germans fought side by 
side against the French (the Germans were glad of 
the Slavs then, they said nothing in disparagement 
of Russian civilization in 18 13). Leipsic, coming as 
it did at the end of the disastrous retreat from 
Russia, completed the downfall of Napoleon, for 
Waterloo, of which we think so much, was only the 
knock-out blow which we gave our great antagonist 
as he struggled up bravely after the count-out had 
been nearly reached at Leipsic. 

The Battle of the Nations has been commemorated 
by a monstrous monument which I have seen only 
under its covering of scaffold-poles, but if one can 
judge by the photographs, it is the most brutal and 
yet the most child's-box-of-brieks-like of any of the 
modern German attempts to make one's flesh creep 
in monumental masonry. Great, lowering, frozen 



GERMANY 43 

faces glare at the beholder, rough, heavy, and dull, 
while,, if I remember aright, here and there the pro- 
jecting eyebrows and nose-ridges have been used in 
true Prussian fashion, as a sort of sentry-box for 
other gaunt and stony figures ; quite an unworthy — 
and unshapely — monument (from a distance it looks 
as though it had been turned out of a mould like a 
blancmange) of a very great event, an event, more- 
over, which ushered in a remarkable period, the 
period of Prussia's greatest progress, when she suc- 
ceeded in adding intelligence and education to her 
traditional iron discipline in war. 

Now we have all been told how wise it is to learn 
from the enemy, and Prussia, during these early years 
of the nineteenth century, was more profitably en- 
gaged, both for herself and for humanity, than she 
had ever been before. Throughout this period after 
liberation from France, she kept steadily in view, of 
course, the attainment of military strength ; but she 
had the wisdom to realize that arms are more than 
armies, and that the real might of a people rests on 
its general strength of body, mind, and soul, even 
more than on its massed battalions. And it is in 
the means she took, the far-sighted measures she 
adopted, to build up the all-round strength of her 
people that Germany is most worthy of study, not 
necessarily of imitation, since one nation's meat may 
well be another nation's poison, but yet of close and 
careful study. The great names in her service are 
very numerous during this period — though we in 
England know all too little of either the men or 
their work. I well remember how flat Sir John 
Seeley's biography of one of them — perhaps the 
greatest, Stein — fell, although it was the chief work 
of one of our greatest historians. Nobody seemed 
interested in Stein or to care to be told what he had 
accomplished. Yet he and his fellow- workers, men 
like Scharnhorst and Humboldt, gave to Prussia not 



44 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

only an improved military system, on the lines of 
universal military service, but also an educational 
system which has put Germany in the forefront of 
Europe. New universities were founded, a system of 
public secondary education on a large scale was 
started a century before we thought of anything of 
the kind, and public interest in the arts and sciences 
was fostered as a State duty for which the State 
largely paid. But chief of all, perhaps, in importance 
was the way in which Prussia handled that change 
which, spreading from England, where it had just 
originated, was bound to reach the continental States 
sooner or later, the change we refer to as the indus- 
trial revolution, the change which had turned England 
from an agricultural into a manufacturing country. 

This change had been allowed to go on unchecked, 
unguided, and unregulated in England because 
England was so busy fighting, first the French 
Revolution and afterwards Napoleon, that she seemed 
to have no time or energy left for putting her own 
house ^ in order. The result was that our manu- 
facturing cities grew up anyhow, and Goldsmith's 
lines — 

Woe to the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay — 

were becoming more terribly true every month. So 
great indeed was the deterioration and so long un- 
checked that even to-day we are only just beginning 
to tackle the problem. We are now engaged in 
making a sort of Doomsday survey of our school- 
children ; and the army of doctors and nurses who 
probe the teeth and ears and noses and mouths 
and examine the eyes of the children in our schools 
to-day, together with the vast array of cooks who 
provide and serve up free halfpenny and penny 
dinners to multitudes of these same children daily, 
are engaged only in a belated attempt to put right 



GERMANY 45 

what ought never to have been allowed, to go wrong— 
the physique of our population. Cobbett was not, 
indeed, exaggerating when early in the nineteenth 
century he described the Birmingham of his day— 
and inferentially therefore every like town— as a Hell- 
hole, a place of torment in which an Imperial race 
was wasting away (through the short-sighted greed of 
gain of the manufacturers and the Government) to the 
point of being physically unfit to bear their world-wide 
burdens— in proof whereof witness the number of 
rejections, and the reasons for them, in the recruiting 
of Lord Kitchener's successive armies, rejections 
which show that though the spirit is willing the 
flesh is weak indeed— " sans eyes, sans ears, sans 
teeth, sans everything,' ' as Shakespeare says. Our 
utilitarian money-grubbers, who had turned England 
into a Tom Tiddler's Ground where everybody was 
exclusively employed in picking up gold and silver, 
had forgotten that even the gains they were making 
out of the nation's physical health were safe so 
long only as the nation as a whole was physically 
fit to keep the enemy from— we won't say the sacred 
soil of England, because greed had hoofed it into 
mud and stamped down all the fair flowers of the 
England of Shakespeare's and Milton's day ; let 
us say instead the vaults in the Bank of England, 
real heart of the Empire. Army service meant to 
them only an annoying dislocation of the labour 
market ; they did not encourage even volunteering. 
Thus in the end even wealth cannot accumulate if 
men decay and the martial spirit is discouraged. 
The Germans learned from our misfortunes, and, 
looking ahead with a foresightedness which to us 
seems quite unattainable, they made provision for the 
orderly and healthy growth of their towns ; their 
martial spirit needed no reorganizing. They ushered 
in the industrial system, without which they would 
never have gained the wealth necessary to their fight- 



46 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

ing forces, in such fashion that it left largely undis- 
turbed the ancient agricultural life which is the 
backbone of a nation's real strength— " a stout 
peasantry, a country's pride," as Goldsmith calls 
it — and, indeed, much also of that picturesque town 
and rural life which has come down from the Middle 
Ages more completely in Germany perhaps than any- 
where else in Europe. They accomplished this 
change so sensibly by a precaution which seems 
simple enough to us now that we are too far gone 
to adopt it. Each growing town acquired the land 
round its outskirts, and thus, as the town grew, its 
growth was regulated in the public interests : its 
streets were laid out broadly and well, public spaces 
were adequately provided, and lastly— and perhaps 
chiefly— all the increment in value, all the increased 
ground-rents which resulted from turning fields and 
woods into building land, came in the form of public 
income to the municipal chest. Thus German towns 
have as a rule no rates to speak of, and yet they have 
plenty of money for municipal purposes. I have 
lost myself more than once in the State-wood or 
town-wood of Coblentz ; again, once when I was 
speaking admiringly of the new Frankfort Town Hall 
to a Frankfort wine-merchant he said : " Yes ; and 
it would have cost only another hundred thousand 
pounds to bring it down to the river and give it 
a river-front*" But it is perhaps at Niiremburg 
that we see the results of this care and forethought— 
so different from the M one step enough for me " 
attitude which masquerades among us in England 
under the name of practicality — at its best. 

That ancient city is as completely surrounded by 
its old walls as Chester, and there seems to be hardly 
a single modern house within their precincts. In 
the Castle the Iron Maiden and other relics remind 
us of mediaeval cruelty and superstition. AVithin its 
shadow stand the houses of Hans Sachs and Albert 



GERMANY 47 

Diirer, filled with treasures. But as one rests at the 
foot or on the rampart of the great tower one looks 
in vain for the manufacturing districts — and yet one 
knows that it is an industrial centre of importance. 
All round the walls one sees fields and open spaces, 
and in the middle distance one of the most beauti- 
fully planned museums I know — a museum which 
is arranged like a series of furnished chambers and 
fitted shops, studies, and workrooms of the different 
periods of German history. But still there is no 
sign of smoke or pollution in the scene before you. 
If, however, the day be clear, then right in the 
distance, beyond the hills and so placed that the 
smoke is carried away from the city of which the 
inhabitants are so proud, one may make out the 
chimneys of the Niiremburg trades. 

The excellent financial system which underlies all 
this town-planning gives the cities of Germany, more- 
over, an independence of which our English 
corporations have no idea. .Whereas the City Council 
of every great English town is continually obliged 
to beg permission from Government Departments to 
raise loans for public works, or to waste the rate- 
payers' money and send up the rates in the costly 
business of getting private Bills through Parliament, 
the German city goes uninterruptedly on its own 
way, laying out its parks, preserving its ancient build- 
ings, planning its own extensions, and rearing its 
splendid State or municipal theatres, opera-houses, 
galleries, and libraries for the continued and recrea- 
tive education of its adult citizens, as well as its 
schools, colleges, and technical institutes for its 
children and youths : and all paid for, be it remem- 
bered, out of the increment value, the ground-rents, 
of the suburban lands it had the foresight to buy 
up during the very period in which so many of our 
own town councillors were making their fortunes 
by speculative building on the outskirts of our 



48 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

English towns — by preying, one might almost say, 
on our common necessities. While the Mayor (a paid 
official) of a German town was a public servant, 
working hard in the interests of the community, the 
rulers of our own towns were only too often making 
money in ways which were little short of treason to 
the interests which they had been chosen to guard. 
It must also be borne in mind that Prussia has 
always aimed at feeding herself in wartime, and 
therefore encouraged agriculture strongly all through 
the period of her industrial revolution ; whereas we 
let agriculture decay in the interest — as we supposed — 
of industry. The fostering of agriculture was as 
great a counterpoise to the evils of the German 
industrial revolution as any. 

I have been describing the most fruitful construc- 
tive period in Prussian history. The work accom- 
plished during those years was so apparently pacific 
that it is small wonder that many who followed its 
course were deceived as to its true object. Thus 
Cobden, in 1838, said: " The Government of 
Prussia is the mildest phase in which absolutism 
ever presented itself. The King, a good, just man, 
has, by pursuing a systematic course of popular 
education, shattered the sceptre of despotism even 
in his own hand and has for ever prevented his 
successors from gathering up the fragments " — a 
statement which only shows how deceptive appear- 
ances may be and how ready we are to read our own 
wishes into whatever we see. For Cobden was a 
pacificist, and he was evidently unable to realize 
that the parent of all this progress was really War 
and its manifold necessities. 

Europe had not long to wait, however, before the 
underlying militarism of Prussia began again to 
reveal itself. Elsewhere in Germany, doubtless, the 
war spirit was in abeyance. Thus, for instance, 
Thackeray, writing in 1855 from Weimar, says : 



GERMANY 49 

" I think I shall never see a society more simple, 
charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike than that of the 
dear little Saxon city where the good Schiller and 
the great Goethe lived and were buried." But 
Weimar is not Berlin, and the little city on the Ilm 
which stands for so much in real German culture 
was no match for her Grenadier neighbour, who had 
for the time being disguised himself in the robe of 
a schoolmaster ; sooner or later Weimar would 
assuredly be drawn also into the vortex of militarism, 
whether she liked it or no. 

Prussia was, then, preparing for fresh military 
efforts by education and by establishing industries 
as well as by equipment and drill. She had mobilized, 
not only her soldiers but also her schoolmasters 
and philosophers, her merchants and traders, even — 
if possible — her artists and poets, the least disci- 
plinable of mankind. But she valued all these 
resources and aspects of her national life in terms 
of soldiers. Like most other States, she had spasms 
of revolution in that year of revolutions 1848 ; but 
she came through this crisis not greatly altered, and 
in 1864 she began her next series of aggressive 
wars. She had then at her head three men whose 
names have been as deeply graven in European his- 
tory as any — King William I, Bismarck, and Moltke, 
whose nephew was prominent early in the present war, 
and under their guidance she went forth to conquer. 

The revolution year 1848 had seen a rebellion 
in Schleswig-Holstein — the isthmus which connects 
Denmark with Germany — against the Danes. This 
rebellion had been helped by Prussia, and in less 
than twenty years after it Prussia, helped by Austria, 
was in possession of the isthmus, which added so 
greatly to the scanty Prussian coast -line. This, then, 
was the first blow — and a very successful one it was ; 
but in 1866 the partners who had brought it off 
quarrelled about it, and so we come to the second 

4 



5o THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

of the three wars to which Prussia owes so much. 
This was the Six Weeks War of 1866 against 
Austria, with Sadowa as its chief battle — a six weeks 
war because Prussia had the first breech -loading 
weapon, the needle gun, and also the field-telegraph 
for the first time ; while Austria — unlucky in war 
throughout her history — was hampered, as she still 
is, by the stiffness and formality which she inherited 
from the Spaniards of our own Henry VIIFs day, 
and which showed itself even at the funeral of the 
murdered Archduke Ferdinand — whose death was the 
excuse for the present 19 14 war. 

By this war Austria lost all hope of the leadership 
of Germany. We might, indeed, say that the 
Hapsburgs, like their relatives the Bourbons, unable 
to learn or forget anything, were no match for the 
ambitious Hohenzollerns, and thus in 1866 Austria 
was turned into the wilderness, there to befriend 
(upon the advice of Bismarck, who always made 
suggestions to help those he had conquered) the 
Eastern people she had hitherto tried to treat as a 
subject race — the Hungarians whom we have already 
mentioned in connection with Attila. Henceforth, 
therefore, we must speak of Austria as Austria - 
Hungary or the Dual Empire ; and Hungarian 
problems and interests will play their part hence- 
forth in moulding Austrian policy. Austria in, as 
it were, marrying Hungary had taken on her debts 
to the Slavs. Her eagle is a two-headed one, facing, 
like Janus, east and west. 

Meanwhile Prussia, as we should expect of the 
victor, was going on from strength to strength. She 
too came to an arrangement with her immediate 
neighbour, but on very different lines from that 
between Austria and Hungary. She rounded on her 
little neighbour Hanover — then ruled by Queen 
Victoria's cousin— drove the King off the throne, 
and annexed the kingdom without any fighting worth 



GERMANY 51 

talking about. Thus the Hanoverians became in- 
voluntary Prussians just as the Holsteiners had 
become a few years earlier. But the wrath of the 
exiled house, the house of Cumberland, was not 
easily appeased ; and it was not, indeed, till about 
a year ago that the Hanoverian house of Guelph 
—or Cumberland — was united to the Hohenzollerns 
by the marriage of the Kaiser's daughter to Prince 
Ernest and the Duchy of Brunswick reconstituted. 

When Prussia had digested Hanover she was ready 
for her next meal, and this proved indeed a dish to 
set before a king. It was no less than France herself. 

Thus we come to the great struggle of 1870. 

Now, in one way the Franco -German War was 
not an aggressive war on the part of Prussia. For 
reasons I shall explain in my next essay, France 
under Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, was 
at this time launched on a policy of military adven- 
ture in some respects like that of Napoleon I him- 
self. The Hohenzollerns had been claiming the 
succession to the Spanish Crown — it is curious that a 
Spanish succession difficulty should have cropped up 
again almost exactly two hundred years after that of 
Louis XIV — but withdrew their claim when the French 
insisted. This withdrawal did not, however, go far 
enough, and the French demanded that the claim 
itself should never be renewed. Such a demand was 
altogether excessive. This is the account of the 
Prussian reply to it as given in the famous Ems 
telegram of July 13, 1870 — a telegram which, how- 
ever, is usually accepted merely as Bismarck's 
account of the incident, with which he intended to 
sting the French to a declaration of war when they 
seemed at the last moment to hesitate about fighting : 
11 His Majesty writes to me : * Count Benedetti spoke 
to me on the promenade, in order to demand from 
me, finally in a very importunate manner, that I 
should authorize him to telegraph at once that 



52 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

I bound myself for all future time never again to 
give my consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew 
their candidature. I refused at last somewhat sternly, 
as it is neither right nor possible to undertake 
engagements of this kind a tout jamais.'' " 

Yet although in form France was the aggressor, 
in reality Prussia was glad of the war, because 
Bismarck saw in this great struggle a final stage 
in the building up of a solid Germany with Prussia 
as the keystone. His ambition was to turn the exist- 
ing Customs Union of the numerous German States 
into a unified Empire, and he hoped to use France 
as the anvil on which the States of Germany should be 
welded by the shock of war into a single political unit. 
Thus, although the French were expecting to repeat 
the easy triumphs of Napoleon I's day, although all 
Paris was crying " To Berlin ! " and the Empress 
Eugenie — who is still alive at Chislehurst helping 
the wounded, and whose recent visit to the seat of 
her former glory at Fontainebleau was so pathetic and 
ominous an event of the earlier part of 19 14 — said, 
" This is my war/' although, in short, France thought 
that all the cards were in her own hands, yet Prussia 
knew differently. And the event proved Prussia right. 
That same winter King Wiilliam of Prussia was 
crowned first Emperor of Germany in Versailles 
—that embodiment of French glory and of earlier 
German defeat which stands some few miles outside 
Paris. 

Not content with this triumph, Germany insisted on 
a two hundred million pound indemnity from France 
and the cession of the two French provinces that 
bordered the Upper and Middle Rhine, Alsace and 
our old friend Lorraine. The Rhine thus became 
a German river except for its two ends ; and with 
these territorial additions, taken for strategic rather 
than political reasons, the newly made German 
Empire came into existence. 



GERMANY 53 

But the triumph of Germany, though complete, 
brought the Empire no ease. Rapid recovery has 
been the outstanding feature of France, and after 
1870 France beat even her own splendid record. 
In two years the immense indemnity had been paid, 
even though to raise the money France had been 
obliged to scrape herself bare of coin, and exist 
for a time on an unredeemable paper currency. And 
beyond that France was always nursing the thought 
of revenge. So terrible, indeed, was her temper 
that by 1876 Bismarck grew fearful and was on 
the point of reopening the war on the question of 
the Alsace bishoprics in order that he might have 
the opportunity of crushing France again before she 
grew too powerful. 

But his ruthless project never took shape, because 
Queen Victoria and the Czar intervened. In its place, 
therefore, he steadily and successfully proceeded to 
build France in and isolate her behind an impene- 
trable wall of alliances which curved like an arch 
through Central Europe and represented the high- 
water mark of Bismarck's achievements. Thus we 
arrive at the celebrated Triple Alliance. Of the 
two Powers which Germany called to her aid, one, 
Austria, though a recently defeated enemy of Prussia, 
came naturally into the agreement, since Bismarck 
had prevented his King from taking any of her land 
in 1866, and since her ruling race and House are 
of German extraction — albeit cumbered by a heavy 
fringe of non-German subject races and linked on 
terms of equality with a people of Tartar origin. 
But as regards the third member of the Triple Alli- 
ance, Italy, a less pronounced attachment was only 
to be expected. Indeed, Bismarck managed to bring 
her in only by pitting her interests and those of 
France in North Africa, Tunis more particularly, 
against each other ; and even when she was thus 
hooked, as it were, by the fomenting of an almost 



54 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

artificial hostility between her and her neighbour 
of the same Latin race and Roman Catholic faith, 
whom Bismarck had encouraged to seek in North 
Africa compensation for Alsace-Lorraine, her posi- 
tion in the Triple Alliance was by no means 
comfortable. 

I was in Trieste on the eve of the funeral of 
Humbert, the second King of Italy — the present 
King is only the third occupant of the Italian 
throne — who was murdered in 1900. On the day 
of the funeral itself I was in both Venice and 
Bologna, and what struck me most was the difference 
between the Austrian seaport and the two Italian 
cities. Trieste had a great altar in her central square, 
and all her churches were draped in black, whereas 
Venice and Bologna were merely shut up. In Trieste 
it was clear that the people had seized on Humbert's 
death as an opportunity for reminding their Austrian 
masters that they were still Italian in sympathy. 
Again, in August, 19 14, I was present at a great 
meeting of Italians in London, called together to 
express sympathy with England in the war ; and it 
was quite clear from the temper of that meeting that 
Italian feeling, so far from being on the side of 
Austria, was strongly opposed to this nominal ally 
of hers, for the simple reason that Austria still holds 
two Italian provinces, Italian Tyrol and Trieste, and 
furthermore, because Italy herself as a united king- 
dom began to arise only when Austria was pushed 
by France out of Lombardy ; how relatively a short 
time back was indicated by the presence at the 
London meeting of the Garibaldi veterans in their 
red shirts, the Balaclava heroes of Italy, men who, 
in their day, had helped to weld Italy as Bismarck 
helped to weld Germany a few years afterwards, 
in the furnace of war. It is also significant that 
the Queen of Italy is a Montenegrin princess ; and 
indeed the Balkan position is simplified by the 



GERMANY 55 

neutrality of Italy. Were she to join in on either 
side, the difficulties in the Balkans would be increased 
indefinitely. 

Later on we shall see, indeed, that Italy ceased 
to be an effective member of the Triple Alliance 
some years before the present war broke out. Her 
present neutrality need not, therefore, surprise any- 
body, especially as the Triple Alliance is a defensive 
and not an offensive alliance. 

During these years Germany was* prospering 
greatly, because she was reaping the reward, not 
only of success in the field but also of all that careful 
and intelligent foresight which we have alreadjy 
described. She was, in fact, rapidly becoming one 
of the largest industrial States in the world, and 
was, as a consequence, increasingly anxious for fresh 
markets wherein to find buyers for her ever-growing 
surpluses. 

Now, hitherto, all her energies had been taken 
up in establishing and maintaining her European 
position. Bismarck had aimed at nothing much 
beyond this, but the rapid growth of German trade, 
requiring as it did a more extended command of 
world markets, was already forcing Germany to look 
beyond Europe in the interests of her traders, with- 
out whose profits the military burdens of the Empire 
could not be sustained. 

It was, however, just in this matter of foreign 
markets that Germany was most severely handi- 
capped. The best markets are a nation's colonies, 
but Germany, as a military power, fully occupied with 
European politics, and coming late into world politics, 
found herself anticipated in all the best regions by 
her more fortunate rivals — nations like England (and 
even Holland), who had been obliged to develop 
sea-power and whose reward was colonies with their 
ever-growing markets. France was even better off 
than her conqueror, for she had still the memory, 



56 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and indeed some remains, of the overseas Empire 
she had lost in the eighteenth century, largely to 
England. 

Her hard fate, the handicap of her late arrival, 
became henceforth the chief obstacle Germany 
struggled against. Treitschke, the Berlin professor 
of history, whose teaching to the soldiers and 
administrators as well as to the students who 
thronged his lecture-room has done so much to mould 
German policy in recent years, says : " Colonization 
w T hich retains a uniformity of nationality has become 
a factor of immense importance for the future of the 
world. It will determine the degree to which each 
nation shares in the government of the world by the 
white race. It is quite possible that a country which 
owns no colonies will no longer count among the 
European Great Powers, however powerful it may 
otherwise be." And elsewhere he has this telling 
phrase : " Those who go to North America are 
entirely lost to Germany.' ' 

These views are more than the views of a historian 
and a philosopher : they are the expression of a 
real German need. " A place in the sun " was no 
mere arrogant demand of a Junker caste ; and if 
only the moon could have been brought near enough 
to the earth to be within the German sphere of influ- 
ence, German land-hunger might conceivably have 
been satisfied. Since, however, this was impossible, 
Germany's only means of getting colonies was 

The good old rule . . . the simple plan, 
That those should take who have the power, 
And those should keep who can. 

If Germany was so powerful in Europe, how was 
it, she wondered, that she was so powerless outside 
Europe? Her world position by no means corre- 
sponded with her European position ; and that was 



GERMANY 57 

not only inconvenient to her traders, but humiliating 
to the Imperial pride of a people who believed them- 
selves to be not only the best drilled and armed but 
also the best schooled people on the Continent, and 
who had developed the habit during the past two 
centuries of taking whatever they wanted by force 
of arms — as is, indeed, to be expected of a people 
whose whole career has been built up on a series 
of aggressive wars. Yet the fact was patent, even 
in the matter of language. German is a small tongue 
for a world language, learnt only by such foreigners 
as wish to reap the rewards of German research 
without going through the spade-work in all those 
arts and sciences which German scholarship has 
probed, whereas French is not only the language 
of diplomacy — even German treaties have to be in 
the language of the people Germany defeated in 
1870 — but also the patois of Europe ; while as for 
English — if the English had only the pluck to reform 
their spelling instead of writing " Manchester " and 
pronouncing it " Liverpool," as a Russian friend of 
mine once put it — English would soon be the world 
language, with Spanish perhaps — yes, even Spanish, 
because of Spain's early mastery of the Spanish Main 
in Elizabeth's day, and hence of South America — 
a tolerable second among European world tongues. 
All these things galled the pride of our German 
cousins, and they began to study the map of the 
world with renewed earnestness. But it was not 
till 1888 that any very definite change came over the 
spirit of German policy. In that year the present 
—and third — Kaiser, William II, came to the throne 
on the deeply lamented death of his noble father, 
Frederick, the second German Emperor, and son-in- 
law of Queen Victoria, and with him the story of 
Germany's development begins afresh. In two years 
he had dismissed Bismarck, who, with the genius of 
a born statesman, had not only guided Germany to 



58 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

the leadership of Europe, but had also — Junker 
though he was — brought her a very considerable dis- 
tance along the path of constitutional progress. The 
old pilot who had welded the Empire into an irre- 
vocable whole and steered it through the dangers 
which threatened its early career was, however, 
dropped — to use the figure in which Punch recorded 
this daring act of the young Emperor — and having 
freed himself from the great Chancellor, William 
freed himself at the same time from Bismarck's 
purely European policy. M The future of Germany 
is on the water " ; " The trident must be in our 
fist " : such was the burden of the new policy — a 
world policy which was to give Germany her place 
in the sun. Germany must expand or explode : her 
surplus products, if not her surplus population, must 
find an outlet overseas. 

But an overseas market can be reached only under 
certain conditions. Quite apart from the risk of 
storms and shipwreck, there is the risk which arises 
from the watchful and overwhelming Navy of a Power 
which already possesses all that Germany regards as 
necessary to her own greatness — colonies and sea 
power. It accordingly becomes necessary for Ger- 
many to develop her sea forces, not only for the 
protection of her coasts as hitherto, but also for 
the protection of her sea-borne trade. And she pro- 
posed to ensure this protection by building up a fleet 
so strong that even the Mistress of the Seas herself 
should hesitate before attacking it, lest she should 
be so crippled in the fight that she might succumb 
to any other Power which chose to take advan- 
tage of her weakness. Germany's naval policy 
is, in short, based on Wellington's maxim, that there 
is only one thing more terrible than a victory, and 
that is a defeat, and on Napoleon's, that you cannot 
make an omelette without breaking eggs. 

But though the Kaiser and his Prussian advisers 



GERMANY 59 

saw quite clearly the need for a Navy, inland 
Germany was not quite so quick to grasp its neces- 
sity. Bavaria, Saxony, iWiirtemburg, and so forth, 
have no seaports, and possibly some of the jealousy 
which marked the old Holy Roman Empire lingered 
still in the Empire of 1870 — and the fall of Berlin 
would probably be a more serious affair for the 
German Empire than the fall of Paris would be for 
France, since the finding of a second capital for 
Germany might awaken jealousies which might 
seriously strain German unity. One reason why the 
Kaiser keeps so many castles in actual use is, I 
believe, that he dare not offend erstwhile sovereign 
States by closing their royal palaces and thus 
reducing them to dependencies. They are willing 
to have the Kaiser as their King or lord, but not to 
be mere subjects of Prussia. 

Therefore, to secure the Navy which meant so 
much to them, the Prussians entered upon a great 
educational campaign throughout the whole of the 
federated German Empire. The German Navy 
League was founded in 1900 ; its postage was all 
paid by the Government, it organized excursions to 
naval bases, and in a short time it numbered a 
million and a half members. 

But it was the seizing of the German ship 
Bundesrath by our English fleet during the Boer 
War that brought home, with real effectiveness to 
the Germans as a whole, a truth which Admiral 
Jellicoe was to drive home still more forcibly in 
1 9 14 — namely, the extent to which the overseas trade 
which was so vital to them as a growing industrial 
nation was dependent on our English goodwill and 
favour — a state of affairs which galled the high- 
spirited German authorities excessively, and even 
touched the pride at last of the masses in Germany. 
Hence the Navy Law was passed, the Kiel Canal — 
through which I passed in 1 9 1 2 — cut, and the German 



60 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Navy rose steadily till it occupied its present position 
of being second only to our own. " Germany needs 
a Navy/' said the Kaiser, " of such strength that a 
war even against the mightiest naval Power would 
involve risks threatening the supremacy of that 
Power." 

The value of her Navy was still further increased 
by the astute deal which enabled her, by yielding 
up Zanzibar to us, to gain Heligoland — which we 
had seized in 1807 — for herself. When Lord Salis- 
bury made the exchange nobody thought of Germany 
as a possible rival at sea ; the island was, moreover, 
rapidly disappearing into the water. But since they 
took it over the Germans have changed all that ; 
its coast hollows have been filled in, guns have been 
mounted, and Heligoland now forms an excellent 
front and screen in the North Sea for the German 
Fleet. 

While Germany's Fleet was growing she was also 
looking round the world for a colonial foothold. 
At one time she seemed to fix her gaze on South 
America, where the various republics were tempt- 
ingly unstable and where the Germans were actually 
settled in large numbers ; but if Germany had ever 
turned her thoughts seriously in that direction, the 
Monroe Doctrine of the big brother republic in the 
North — the " Hands off, Europe ! " policy of the 
United States — had to be reckoned with, and Germany 
turned elsewhere. 

South Africa seemed a hopeful area also. 
Treitschke had seen in the sturdy resistance of 
the Boers the one failure — as he thought — in English 
colonial policy. Majuba seemed to him the Achilles' 
heel of our Empire, and German thought, stimu- 
lated by his teaching, worked in the following 
direction : South Africa is now relatively unim- 
portant to England, since the English hold on Egypt, 
consequent upon the French agreement (of which 



GERMANY 61 

more anon), secures them the Suez Canal route to 
India. On the other hand, the Dutch both in Holland 
and at the Cape are a Teuton people in blood, lan- 
guage, and culture. The Dutch colonies are more- 
over still considerable, despite the weakness of 
Holland in Europe ; even the memory of sea -power 
seems more fruitful than the undisputed possession of 
land -power. Why should not Holland — which more- 
over holds the mouth of the Rhine and whose port, 
Rotterdam, rivals London by reason of its German 
trade — strike a bargain with Germany to the benefit 
of both and the Boers receive German help? 

Now, this was not merely an academic and specu- 
lative policy. It touched the happenings of actual 
politics when, in 1895, Kruger said : " I know that 
I may count on the Germans in future. I feel 
certain that when the time comes for the Transvaal 
to wear larger clothes Germany will have done much 
to bring this about. The time is coming for our 
friendship to be more firmly established than ever." 
After this the Kaiser's wire to Oom Paul seems less 
irresponsible, and it is noteworthy that the year of 
the Boer War (1900) is also the year of the forming 
of the German Navy League. But German hopes 
in South Africa were also doomed to disappointment. 
The Germans could not go to the help of the Boers 
because we held the seas between, and the bitterness 
produced among the Boers themselves by the war 
of 1899-1902 died down, although attempted risings 
in the autumn of 1 9 1 4 showed that some embers still 
glowed in response to the fanning of Germany. It 
is thus not difficult to trace the connection between 
our own Boer War and the great war of 19 14. 

Another area in which Germany tried her luck 
was in the Far East. In the days when people 
talked of the partition of China among France in 
the south, England in the centre, and Russia in the 
north, Germany wondered where she came in ; and 



62 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

after the Japanese had defeated China, Germany 
actually joined with France and Russia to rob Japan 
of the fruits of her victory. It was thus that Russia 
obtained Port Arthur and held it for a few years. 
Germany also obtained Kiao-Chou from China. It 
is thus easy to see why Japan was so quick to 
turn Germany out of Tsing Tau or Kiao-Chou. A 
German general also commanded the European troops 
of all nations which dealt — none too squeamishly — 
with the Boxer rebels in China. 

Two colonies Germany did indeed manage to 
secure, besides various outposts — German East Africa 
and German South -West Africa, when the Dark 
Continent was divided up with a ruler on a round 
table ; but, as the Crown Prince is reported to 
have said recently, il Neither of these colonies is 
worth twopence, for if they had been England would 
have had them long ago." If, however, the two 
were joined, as some Germans would like, the Cape 
to Cairo idea of Great Britain would be thwarted. 

But it must be borne in mind that however strong 
her desire and need for a Colonial Empire may have 
been, Germany could not give her whole energy to 
these overseas adventures, for the simple reason that 
throughout her history Germany has ever been first 
and foremost a European Power — a Power, that is 
to say, which must give first thought to the way things 
are going in Europe. And during the years of the 
present Kaiser's reign the position of the German 
Empire as continental cock-of-the-walk has not 
been getting any easier ; on the contrary, it has 
been growing more and more difficult every year. 
It therefore behoves us to turn for the moment back 
from overseas Germany — such as it is — to the 
Germany which lies between France and Russia. 

Between France and Russia — there's the rub 1 For 
the prostrate France of 1870 had not only recovered 
— we have seen that already — she had done more ; 



GERMANY 63 

she had eluded the isolation of the Triple Alliance 
which Bismarck had so cunningly and laboriously 
built round her, and was at last befriended #nd 
partnered again in Europe — and by Russia, of all 
States ! That is why Germany has to-day to per- 
form the miracle of wildly flinging army corps across 
and across from one frontier to another, as they 
are most wanted, like living shuttles in a gigantic 
loom. 

How this alliance came about must be left till 
the next essay. I must content myself at this point 
with saying simply that France not only had a friend 
in Europe, but that she had also the dependencies 
which Germany had been denied by her late arrival 
among the great Powers — colonies and possessions 
of an extent and value second only to those of 
England. By giving England a free hand in Egypt 
France had obtained a free hand in Morocco, and 
from Algiers, which touches Morocco, and her other 
African possessions she could draw troops — Moslem 
fighting fanatics — who would go far towards redress- 
ing the numerical deficiency of the white French 
Army as compared with that of Germany. Thus the 
Germans found themselves between inexhaustible 
Russia on the one hand and a France on the other 
which, so far from being outstripped as regards forces 
by the higher birth-rate of Germany, was able to 
draw ever-increasing numbers of first-class fighters 
from her African provinces. 

The problem which Germany had to face was a 
grave one. The pressure of these two powerful States 
on her eastern and western frontiers was tremendous ; 
at the same time she was building up a Navy to 
resist the menacing pressure, as she thought it, of 
the British fleets on her North Sea coasts ; and to 
brace herself against these gigantic forces which were 
thus weighing upon her from three sides, Germany 
had to emphasize more than ever her military aspect, 



64 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

not only in actual men and material but also in the 
character and outlook which give the real thrust 
to material preparation. Just as the shells of the 
deep-sea shell-fish increase with the intensity of the 
water-pressure to which they are subjected, so did 
the militarism of Germany increase under the conjoint 
pressure of England, France, and Russia, and for 
the same reason — self-defence. 

And again, like the mollusc, she was all the while 
strengthening her internal resistance by drawing — or 
scheming to draw — the material she required to build 
up her defensive forces from outside her own borders. 

She was faced on the west by a foe who had 
already tapped one such source of supply — the 
Moslems of North Africa, the Algerians who figure 
in the French Army as Turcos. Where could Ger- 
many tap a similar source of strength? 

Now, an Islamic people lay quite close at hand, as 
a matter of fact — indeed, in Europe itself. Later 
we shall have to see how these Moslems, the Turks, 
came into Europe and what effect they produced 
on the lands they conquered ; but that is another 
story, as Kipling says. All that I can say here is 
that the Turks are still established, though with 
woefully lessened prestige, in the Balkans. 

The thousand years of Christianity at Constanti- 
nople had been succeeded by nearly five centuries 
of Moslem rule, and the Turks still stretched across 
the Bosphorus to the Adriatic. It was these Turks 
whom Germany befriended. She found Turkey " the 
Sick Man of Europe " ; she tended him and nursed 
him, and when he was strong enough she armed 
him and drilled him till he had become her ally in 
all but name, her protege in all that threatened his 
well-being. Nor did the Germans stop there. They 
were anxious to develop his resources for him in 
Asia Minor and financed his Bagdad Railway for 
him ; not that there was much trade to be done 



GERMANY 65 

in the desolate lands of Mesopotamia through which 
the railway runs, but because the rail, like an arte- 
sian well, would drive deep into a people whose 
natural fighting qualities were heightened by the 
fact that their ruler was Vicegerent of Allah on 
earth— and the Germans were his best friends. 
There may be commercial possibilities in this region 
later, and possibly commercial rivalry with Russia 
for its exploitation may be one cause of this war, 
but primarily I think the line is strategic. 

Still further to strengthen his hold over these 
fanatics and thus to rival the influence of England 
in the Moslem world— for George V has millions 
of Moslem subjects in India— and to show France 
that Germany too had her influence in the world 
of Islam and could match French Turcos with genuine 
Turks, the Kaiser toured through Palestine— as his 
father Frederick had done also, I believe— visiting 
such German colonies as he could find there and 
himself preaching in a church at Jerusalem. 

Nor did German enterprise stop at this twentieth- 
century pilgrimage. No sooner had France obtained, 
by agreement with England, a free hand in Morocco, 
which is next Algiers and carries French North Africa 
to the Atlantic, than Germany suddenly remembered 
her commercial interests in that sun-baked corner 
of Africa and posed once again as the champion of 
Tslam, the Kaiser visiting the country in 1905. It 
is true that as regards Morocco she was unfortunate, 
for although at Algeciras she seemed to put a check 
on French projects, yet when a little later she tried 
to intervene more effectively by sending the gun- 
boat Panther to Agadir she had to withdraw both 
her claims and her gunboat before the reviving vigour 
of the French and the support the French received 
from England. I well remember the caricature in, 
I think, Jugend, which represented a forlorn panther 
crawling shamefully out of the mud of Agadir Bay ; 

5 



66 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

it was a terrible humiliation for Germany to be 
forced in this way to acknowledge the special interests 
of France in Morocco. 

But Turkey still remained for her to protect — 
and was not Turkey the best of all the Moslem 
States, not only as a military Power drilled on 
German lines, but also as the recognized head of 
Islam? 

It was the conviction that Turkey was sound that 
encouraged Germany to continue in her character 
of champion of Islam, but even as regards Turkey 
herself Germany was unfortunate. The German plan 
of writing M Fatherland " from Hamburg by way 
of Berlin and Vienna to Constantinople (only 
negligible little Serbia stood in the way) and then 
on to Bagdad became as visionary as an " Arabian 
[Nights " tale of the Bagdad of Haroun al-Raschid, 
when Abdul Hamid was driven from his throne in 
1909 by a revolution that was headed by Turkish 
officers educated in Switzerland and elsewhere in 
West Europe, who called themselves the Young Turk 
party — and who, by the way, were less strict Moham- 
medans than they should have been if they were to 
continue tc inspire the Turkish soldiers with enthu- 
siasm. But although not violent Moslems, the new 
rulers of Turkey were violent Turks, and the excesses 
of their policy of Ottomanization — which was the 
Balkan equivalent of the Germanization practised by 
their Prussian protectors — increased the troubles they 
w r ere bound to meet. Later we shall see the full 
effect of this revolution. For the present it will 
be sufficient to say that the new Government began 
very badly ; it lost two provinces and a suzerainty 
at once; but worse than that, it soon — in 191 1 — 
found itself at war with Italy for the possession of 
Tripoli. 

vWe have already seen how Bismarck was able to 
use North Africa for getting Italy into the Triplice 



GERMANY 67 

or Triple Alliance ; now we see this same region 
playing a decisive part in the break-up of this same 
Central European organization. " Out of Africa, 
always something to disturb/' says the old Classic 
phrase, and certainly the effect of the war in Tripoli 
was sufficiently startling. I cannot resist, indeed, 
the pun which seems to summarize the whole posi- 
tion : " The Triplice tripped up over Tripoli. " For 
what was the situation? Nothing less than this : 
a war between Germany's ally, Italy, and Germany's 
protege, Turkey. We can well understand why Bern- 
hardi regards Italy as having left the Triple Alliance 
in 191 1 — an alliance about which she had never 
been really keen, and which has never been an 
aggressive alliance. Italy's North African interest 
first drove her into the Triple Alliance and then 
drove her out again. 

Well, Italy won, and took Tripoli, while Turkey 
was greatly weakened as a result of the war. Now 
this weakening of Turkey is the critical matter for 
us, since it enabled the little States which had 
formerly been under Turkey — Greece, Bulgaria, 
Serbia, and Montenegro — to form themselves into a 
federation for the purpose of attacking Turkey and 
taking from her the provinces — largely Christian as 
regards their inhabitants — she still held in Europe. 
These little States fell on Turkey exactly a year 
and a day after the declaration of the Tripoli War, 
and by their united efforts — so much more success- 
ful than the isolated attack of Greece in 1897 — wore 
down their opponent, already weakened by the Tripoli 
War. They say it was very curious to see the' 
Austrian barges going down the Danube with war 
material for Turkey and the Russian coming up with 
material for Serbia. The French training of the 
Bulgarian artillery proved better than the German 
training of the Turkish Army, and before long Turkey 
was reduced to the tract of land stretching about 



68 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

fifty miles round Constantinople— somewhat to the 
annoyance of most of the diplomatists of Europe, 
I fancy, who had been secretly hoping that Turkey, 
would win and thus preserve the then existing balance 
of forces in the Balkans, and therefore also in 
Europe. Such, however, was not to be ; and the 
struggle among the victors for the spoils— inevitable 
when we consider, as we shall presently, the character 
of these various Balkan States— does not affect our 
story. The great fact that arises out of the war 
change in the Balkans is that Germany's friend and 
protege, Turkey, had been beaten and broken and 
various obscure little States had suddenly become 
important, and had learnt the art of acting in 

concert. 

All we can pause to say about these States at this 
point is that they were Slav— of the same race, that 
is to say, as Russia. The fact, then, that States of 
Slav or Russian blood had appeared to the south- 
east of Austro-Germany, that a branch of the hostile 
Slav race of the east had displaced the friendly 
Turks of the Balkans, suddenly awoke Germany to 
the realities of her European position, and drove 
away for the time being all thoughts of colonial 
expansion and world politics. For not only had 
Germany virtually lost Italian help by the troubles 
of Turkey, she found herself also outflanked in the 
south-east by her eastern enemy, Russia. Thus Ger- 
many, which had walled in France by the Triple 
Alliance, now in her turn found herself walled m 
by the Slavs. Nor is this the full extent of the 
trouble. Austro-Hungary, the eastern member of 
the German Alliance, has, as we have already seen, 
a heavy fringe of Slav and non-German peoples, 
and these were only too likely to feel the attrac- 
tion of a new Slav Power in the Balkans— a Power 
which had surprised Europe, not only by its share 
in the victory over Turkey but subsequently by its 



GERMANY 69 

victory over the real conqueror of Turkey, Bulgaria 
herself. The Slav Power which could claim this 
record was, of course, Serbia — the insignificant 
obstacle of a few years previously which had stood 
in the way of the German flow to the east by way of 
Constantinople. 

By 191 2, however, this insignificant obstacle had 
grown to be a grave menace. Its three wars — 
Turkish, Bulgarian, Austrian — have built it up as 
the three Prussian wars of the 'sixties built Prussia 
up ; its prestige was attracting the Slav subjects 
of Austria into its orbit, and it was already in close 
touch with its big brother, Russia. (So much for the 
German contempt for small States and small armies, 
like the Serbian — and the British. The Germans 
seem to see only what they wish to see.) Thus 
with the seven million Austrian Slavs drawn towards 
the four millions of Serbia and Montenegro, the 
Austrian-Italians drawn, as we have already seen, 
towards Italy, and the Austrian-Roumanians of 
Transylvania drawn to their Roumanian fellow-kins- 
men to the east — not a Slav race — the German Alli- 
ance felt that its eastern member, Austria, was 
imperilled, and therefore the whole German position 
threatened, not only by the general outflanking move- 
ment of the Slav development in the south-east, 
but also by the counter-attraction, the strain on the 
loyalty of all Austrian subjects who were neither 
German nor Magyar — i.e. Hungarian — which this out- 
flanking movement of the Balkan Slavs set up within 
the borders of the Austro- Hungarian Empire itself 
by the mere fact of its presence. 

The situation was grave, and Germany met it with 
characteristic thoroughness. Sooner or later Ger- 
many would have to " hack her way through " ; war 
was inevitable before long, especially with a ruler 
as unstable as William II on the throne. She 
therefore began to put the final touches to her pre- 



70 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

parations the while she was seeking for the best 
opportunity of striking at the foes which threatened 
to encircle her. Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism 
— helped by France — were approaching their final 
struggle. If we need evidence of the fact that 
Germany was preparing herself to fight first and 
foremost for her European leadership, we may find 
it in two significant acts of this period : first, in 
the acceptance of a 60 per cent, superiority of the 
English Navy over the German ; second, in the tax 
on capital which gave I know not how many millions 
for war purposes — largely, I believe, in the nature 
of fortifications and capital expenditure. 

This second effort called forth the French reply : 
the three years' law in the Army. When each side 
was forcing the pace thus, war was but a matter of 
time and opportunity. And indeed the introduction 
of such large new factors on either side so disturbed 
the calculations of relative strength that this very 
uncertainty of itself brought war nearer. In par- 
ticular, the disorganization resulting from the three 
years' law in France tempted Germany to strike. 

Already had the German Powers brought Europe 
to the brink of war in the matter of the Balkans. 
No sooner was Abdul Hamid deposed, and the Young 
Turk party established, than, as we have seen already, 
Turkey lost two provinces. These were the pro- 
vinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria 
now turned from a protectorate — the position they 
had been accorded by the Treaty of Berlin in 1877 
— into integral parts of the Austrian Empire in 1909. 
Immediately Serbia was up in arms, since the two 
provinces were part of Old Serbia, and the little 
Slav kingdom expected to annex them on the break- 
up of Turkey. Russia, too, lent an ear to the com- 
plaint of the Serbians, which was brought to St. 
Petersburg by their Crown Prince, and it looked 
already as though fighting might take place. To 



GERMANY 71 

keep the peace, Sir Edward Grey proposed a con- 
ference to determine the ownership of the two pro- 
vinces ; but suddenly Germany appeared " in shining 
armour " behind her friend Austria, and the con- 
ference was never held. Austria kept the provinces, 
and Germany had scored heavily, because Russia was 
still weak from the Japanese War, and France had 
not yet experienced that reawakening of her natural 
fighting spirit which has been so marked a feature of 
the last three or four years. Thus was the encircling 
movement checked for a while, and Turkey on the 
outer side of the circle — the friend who calls from 
beyond the Slav ring, much as Russia had called to 
France from beyond the ring of the Triplice some 
years earlier — plucked up fresh courage. 

But the movement was not stopped, it was only 
checked, and before long the Germans had to seek 
another opportunity. This occurred when the heir 
to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Ferdinand, 
and his wife were assassinated in the streets of 
Serajevo, the capital of the newly annexed province. 
This murder is full of dark aspects. Ferdinand 
favoured a federal instead of a dual Empire, and 
on his accession would have granted fuller rights 
to the Austrian Slavs. There is a strong suspicion, 
therefore, that his death was welcomed by the 
Austrians who supported the Dual Monarchy 
arrangement. And suspicion goes even deeper. 
Ferdinand remonstrated after the failure of the first 
attempt on his life against the total lack of pro- 
tection afforded him. But whether his death was 
engineered or not, Austria demanded such humiliating 
terms from Serbia, whose papers and hotheads were 
accused of having brought about the crime, that 
Serbia, relying on the support of her co-religionist 
and blood-brother, Russia, refused. Russia seconded 
her refusal, and the crisis had arrived. Austria was 
on the point of coming to terms, however, with her 



72 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Slav neighbours, since Serbia was prepared for almost 
any arrangement that would save her from a third 
War, but Germany, coming forth a second time sud- 
denly, as she had done before in the matter of the 
annexed provinces in 1909, rattling her sword in 
her scabbard, with the mailed fist and all the rest of 
it, demanded — evidently for her own ends since 
Austria was almost agreed with Serbia — that the 
Russians should proceed no further in massing 
troops : that Russia should stand aside while once 
more 

An Austrian army awfully arrayed 
By bold battery besieged Belgrade, 

and disband her army while Slavs were still liable 
to slaughter by Germans. When Russia refused, 
Germany declared war, and invaded Belgium to get 
at France without a frontal attack on the line of 
French forts between Luxemburg and Switzerland. 

The pressure Germany thus felt herself to be 
resisting was, however, of her own making. Every 
State has neighbours across its borders ; but Ger- 
many's tradition has been to remind her neighbours 
of her presence by sabre-rattling. That is why she 
complains of pressure on both east and west, a very 
different pressure from that which results when a 
State is content merely to guard her integrity and 
protect her frontiers. But that has never satisfied 
Germany, for without aggressive war Germany thinks 
she would still be the patchwork of the Middle Ages 
or else divided between France and Russia. 

Germany thought in July 19 14 that at last the 
favourable moment for war had come, for although 
Germany speaks of herself as " hacking her way 
through/' she does not mean by that that she is 
merely hacking at the encircling folds of Pan- 
Slavism. She means, further, that she is hacking 
her way through not only her European difficulties, 



GERMANY 73 

but her world difficulties as well, and that when 
the war is ended not only will she be freed from the 
tremendous continental pressure of recent years, but 
also and by the same war she will be rid of the mari- 
time and colonial handicaps under which she has 
hitherto run her race. The intensity and destructive- 
ness of an explosion depend upon the confinement of 
the charge ; and the fact that Germany finds herself 
practically inside a Slav pocket with the French 
to put the lid on gives to the German military move- 
ment an intensity and a violence which, the Germans 
believe, will not only shatter the enclosing masses, 
but also supply in addition the energy that will 
carry the Germans to the colonial Empire and world 
dominion they believe to be rightly theirs. The 
German Chancellor tacitly admitted to our Ambas- 
sador at Berlin that it was the French colonies — with 
their Turcos — that the Germans were after. 

For Germany this is, then, a second war of 
liberation, a striking off of shackles, European and 
oceanic. She means to do what England did under 
Chatham's leadership : win an Empire on the battle- 
fields of Europe. The hour seemed favourable to 
Germany — as favourable, that is to say, as any could 
be in a situation which was in reality a desperate 
one, and from the very desperation of which the 
Germans proposed to draw their strength in the war 
their fate had rendered inevitable. It seemed favour- 
able because Russia was still supposed to be suffer- 
ing from the effects of the Japanese War, and to 
be behindhand with her frontier troop railways, 
while also there was always the possibility of dis- 
affection among the Revolutionaries and the Jews, 
Poles and others. France was plunged in the midst 
of the Caillaux trial, which bore some resemblance to 
earlier scandals like the Panama and Dreyfus affairs, 
which had shaken France to her foundations. There 
had also been ministerial confessions that the Army 



74 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

was not so well equipped as it ought to be, and 
was suffering from the reorganization necessitated 
by the Three Years' Law. England was on the verge 
of civil war over the Home Rule question ; the 
Army was split into political factions, and rebel armies 
were being formed in Ireland (had not Treitschke 
said, " England's mishandling of Ireland shrieks to 
Heaven "?). India was full of Hindu sedition ; and 
we had alienated the fighting Indian Moslems by 
leaving Turkey to her fate in the Tripoli War with 
Italy. We know how Germany miscalculated, as 
indeed she had already miscalculated in the similar 
case of the Boers ; but at the time of the Home 
Rule split, when even the King was calling fruit- 
less conferences, to the German mind, which can 
judge of events — as we all can — simply in the light 
of its own ideas and experience, these signs, in 
England especially, were propitious. Finally, it 
seemed impossible to the Germans that England, 
under a Liberal Government, could ever bring herself 
to fight on the side of the Czar and his Cossacks. 
Therefore the alarm was given, war was declared, 
and the Germans set out on that perilous road which 
more gifted races have essayed to traverse without 
success — the road to world supremacy. 

England's attitude in the crisis must be left to a 
later essay, but nobody who wishes really to under- 
stand the march of these latest events, especially 
as they affected England, can afford to neglect the 
admirable Blue Book which the Government has 
issued for a penny. 



II 

CHARACTER 

Like Carpentier, the White Hope (how distant that 
phrase sounds ! ), who is now, I believe, in the 
French Army air service, Germany relied entirely 
on a rapid attack in her first encounter with 
her old foe France to free herself for her fight with 
Russia. 

Now t fighting of this description is a matter of 
intensified energy ; and intense energy has, as a rule 
in the history of warfare, come from one source and 
one source only, and that is basically religion, 
though working out in forms which to us appear of 
course hardly religious. 

We have already seen how great fighters the 
Mohammedans are, how eager both France and 
Germany have shown themselves to be in tapping 
these sources of religious fanaticism each to her own 
advantage. But Germany has aimed at developing 
the same religious intensity of belief in war among 
her own people. From the very beginning this has 
been a characteristic note of German fighting. 
Frederick the Great in his younger days expressed 
— always in French — the noblest sentiments ; and 
doubtless believed that all his aggressions — e.g. in 
Silesia — were for the furtherance of the exalted ideals 
to be found in his " Anti-Machiavel." In 1870 it 

appears again. I remember seeing in an old number 

75 



76 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

of Punch the following parody of the Prussian King's 
pious letters to his wife : — 

This comes to say, my dear Augusta, 
We've had another awful buster. 
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below — 
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow ! 

It is not therefore altogether an innovation for the 
present Kaiser to bring God into the battlefield as the 
sons of Eli attempted to do when they shouldered 
the Ark of the Covenant. The German sword-arm 
is to be strengthened by the same spirit as that which 
strengthened the sword-arm of Israel : " The sword 
of the Lord and of Gideon.' ' The Germans are the 
new Chosen People, the Kaiser is a new Joshua who 
shall lead his fellow-tribesmen into the Promised 
Land after forty years of following the pillar of 
fire and cloud in the wilderness, a new David " who 
hath slain his ten thousands " and the Lord's 
anointed. He speaks by Divine Right as one who 
has been admitted to the counsels of the Most High 
and been permitted to share with Him the leader- 
ship of the world's appointed conquerors — and 
saviours. It seemed, indeed, quite fitting that the 
Kaiser himself should preach in the German mission 
church when he made his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 
the home of Theocracy. This is how he speaks to 
his troops going to the war — 

" Remember that the German people are the 
chosen of God. On me, on me as German Emperor, 
the Spirit of God has descended. I am His weapon, 
His sword, and His visard. Woe to the disobedient ! 
Death to cowards and unbelievers ! " 

It reminds us of the frenzied ravings of a Mahdi. 
Beside it the words of our own Cromwell — a Theocrat 
if ever there was one — seem quite drab : as at 
Dunbar : " It was a crowning mercy. We never 



GERMANY 77 

charged but we scattered the enemy j the Lord 
made them as stubble to our swords ! " The old 
Hebrew religion and 1 its offshoot Islam are the 
dynamos from which much fighting energy has 
been drawn. Among the Japanese the same spirit 
is, of course, predominant, but with them it is so 
much a matter of course that they do not trouble to 
elaborate it in declamations. Here is another ex- 
tract from a less exalted person than the Heaven- 
sent Hohenzollern which nevertheless breathes the 
same spirit. A Field-Marshal (Bronsart von 
Schellendorf) writes : — 

" Do not let us forget the civilizing task which the 
decrees of Providence have assigned to us. Just as 
Prussia was destined to be the nucleus of Germany, 
so the regenerated Germany shall be the nucleus of 
a future Empire of the West. And in order that no 
one shall be left in doubt, we proclaim from hence- 
forth that our continental nation has a right to the 
sea, not only to the North Sea, but to the Mediter- 
ranean and Atlantic. Hence we intend to absorb 
one after another all the provinces which neighbour 
on Prussia. We will successfully annex Denmark, 
Holland, Belgium, Northern Switzerland, and then 
Trieste and Venice ; finally Northern France from 
the Sambre to the Loire. This programme Ave fear- 
lessly pronounce. It is not the work of a madman. 
The Empire we intend to found will be no 
Utopia. We have ready to our hands the means 
of founding it and no coalition in the world can 
stop us." 

Talk of Predestination!! 

But the religious fervour of the Germans differs 
from that of the Turks in this, that whereas the 
Moslems are inspired by the idea of a One God who 
is their actual leader, though heavenly, the Germans 
are inspired, if they can be inspired by any such 
idea, by the idea they have gathered from Darwin's 



78 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

" Origin of Species " and Herbert Spencer's " Natural 
Selection/' the idea summed up in Tennyson's line — 

Nature red in tooth and claw, 

which merely identifies man with the brutes. 

The Germans claim to be inspired by the frigid 
forces of evolution ; they regard themselves as the 
chosen people through whose virile destructiveness 
the higher ranges of civilization will be conquered 
for mankind. I should imagine that none of their 
present-day philosophers would allow that evolution 
could be in the direction indicated by Shakespeare's 
line — 

The quality of mercy is not strained. 

They are quite blind to the fact that the English 
pioneers of evolution had been alive to the dangers 
of this false analogy, and that Huxley had said most 
emphatically that " any one who used the argument 
of Nature against the ideal of justice and of equal 
law was as senseless as a gardener who should fight 
on the side of ill weeds merely because they grew 
apace/' to quote from Mr. G. K. Chesterton's " Vic- 
torian Literature." But to this wise warning against 
unscientific argument by analogy the Prussian leaders 
were blind. To Prussia mercy was a weakness, justice 
an ideal for the feeble. Sparta, she remembered, 
kept her standard of manhood and through that — 
behind her living walls of human muscle — she pre- 
served her national existence only by a merciless 
exposure and killing out of her own weaklings ; and 
Prussia, the modern Sparta, surrounded, in her own 
opinion, with an equally menacing mass of hostile 
peoples, can afford mercy and the other degenerate 
virtues of the religion of Love as little as could 
Sparta herself. Circumstances produce character, and 
if we do not like the way Germany is developing we 



GERMANY 79 

should not blame the Germans but blame rather the 
forces which are moulding them. That is the Ger- 
man attitude as I understand it. The Germans are 
the chosen people of the ruthless deity they call 
Evolution, just as the Jews are the Chosen People of 
Jehovah, the jealous God, the Turks of Allah, the 
bloodthirsty. And they fight with the same blind 
indifference to the useless and avoidable damage 
they do as the Turks showed when they burnt the 
library at Alexandria. This is the real test of bar- 
barism : the lack of proportion of means to end, 
the wanton and stupid doing of damage for its own 
sake. 

We must not be any more surprised at the German 
laudation of war and its virtues than we are at the 
Spartan. Modern Evolution may have given the 
Germans another vocabulary, but the ideas are the 
same among both races. To both war is the father 
of all, and by war they both mean fighting to win 
by any means, simply because they cannot afford to 
lose, since defeat means annihilation at the hands of 
outraged enemies. Virtues which are not useful in 
war are not virtues, and thus in both cases we get 
a stronger or weaker tendency (for no merely human 
being has the dreadful courage of all his convictions) 
towards theft, callous slaughter, and brutality as an 
asset of the gladiator or professional bruiser ; and 
lack of chivalry. Sons of the dragon's teeth that they 
are (or persuade themselves into being), the fight is 
the thing in itself and quite apart from the result. 
11 We'll win first and then make up our mind what use 
we shall make of our victory," is their attitude. Alike, 
too, in the baleful effects of a brutalizing specializa- 
tion both Germans and Spartans showed a lack of 
intelligence and inability to grasp the point of view 
of others or to allow for motives different from their 
own, a wrong estimate of the effect of their terror- 
striking methods, an intellectual activity which seldom 



80 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

rises above the level of cunning where even the 
largest and gravest questions of war are concerned 
and not merely its field-fighting details — all of 
which go far to neutralize the effectiveness of their 
actual fighting. It is no less astonishing to read of 
the Spartans refusing to fight because the day was 
unlucky or their path had been crossed than it is to 
discover how Germany guessed wrong again and 
again in her preliminary moves, and even during the 
progress of the war itself. For instance, England 
was bound to be neutral. Because Germany knows 
no method of rule beside that of terror — making 
Polish children say their prayers in German, putting 
Brussels on to German time, forcing German names 
on to Belgian babies, making the people of Amiens 
salute common German soldiers — therefore England 
also can only terrorize her subjects (the Germans 
could not imagine a conqueror befriending and assimi- 
lating the conquered in the great old Roman way) ; 
and, therefore, in consequence of her terrorism, 
once England is engaged in war she will be faced 
with rebellion in Ireland, India, the Cape, every- 
where, while her colonies will be glad of the chance 
to cut the painter and slip away from the tyranny of 
the Mother Country ! Therefore England dare not 
risk war. 

The mailed fist has also spoiled Germany's touch 
for the delicate strings of diplomacy, and thus her 
barbarous coarseness has bungled her business so 
badly that it has brought all her enemies about her 
head at once instead of in single file, to be killed like 
geese one at a time as they should have been. 

Again, she thought that terror and wanton 
slaughter, the firing of libraries, the shelling of cathe- 
drals and the dropping of bombs on open towns, 
would frighten the civil populations, and they in their 
turn would frighten their Governments into submis- 
sion — as bad a guess as that the British soldiers would 



GERMANY 81 

be scared out of their wits by monstrous stink-pot 
shells, to which our men merely gave contemptuous 
nicknames, or that the British Army could be safely 
ignored after two weeks of rearguard fighting in 
which they had already established a " personal 
ascendancy " over the enemy. No ; their simple 
hypothesis of evolution towards brutality has not 
worked. It is not broad-based enough to take in the 
whole of the facts of human nature. It is a following 
out of a single idea with a pedantry which would be 
almost pathetic if it were not so atrocious, and so the 
Government are reduced to continual lying and con- 
cealment to keep their own people in good heart about 
the war, apparently. Their belief in might has raised 
even mightier forces in defence of right and therefore 
stands condemned on its own showing. In short, the 
calculated brutality of German warfare is defeating 
its own ends since it is strengthening opposition. 
The Germans, in fact, know too little of human 
nature in general to be an Imperial people. Yet this 
philosophy, preached in universities and taught in 
schools, where children are encouraged, for instance, 
to compare war with a thunderstorm, however lacking 
it must ultimately prove itself to be even as a per- 
manent basis for fighting, still less for statecraft, has, 
nevertheless, sunk deeply into the German mind. 

The Kaiser can say to his men, when going against 
the Boxers in China : " Whosoever falls into your 
hands is forfeit to you, just as a thousand years ago 
the Huns under King Attila made a name for them- 
selves which is still mighty in tradition " — and in 
nothing else, for, on the death of our old friend of 
the Dark Ages, the well-known scourge of God, 
the Huns vanished without leaving any trace except 
a wake of destruction. And Busch says that in 1870 
Bismarck said to a general who reported a large 
capture of French soldiers : " That does not please 
me. What are we to come to at last with them all? 

6 



82 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Why do they take so many prisoners? " From utter- 
ances such as these the transition to Nietzsche's 
" Beyond Good and Evil " is not difficult. It is a 
creed which, terrible though it may seem, is really 
responsible for the present " Ger mania contra 
mundum" This war is a people's war ; the German 
Socialists support it as we expected they would. It 
is no one-man-made war ; although in events of 
this magnitude the man — especially when he has the 
personal traits of Kaiser Wilhelm II — is as important 
a factor as the hour. 

It is easy to say that Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bern- 
hardt and the rest made the war, but it is at least 
arguable that these are only the mouthpieces of a still 
deeper but otherwise inarticulate race feeling, and that 
the thwarted desires and aspirations of a great people 
have expressed themselves in the half-insane writings 
of those thinkers who were most responsive to the 
national current. Be that as it may, the madness 
which actually showed itself in Nietzsche has reinfected 
the German people, and we are now in the presence 
of a very difficult problem — how to deal with a war- 
maddened race, a race which believes that war is 
not only the rough shield of the gentler civic virtues, 
but that these virtues themselves should be as hard 
as their warlike sheath. All I can suggest is that no 
amount of sympathy, no amount of understanding 
would prevent the owner of a favourite dog which 
had suddenly gone mad from destroying it, or, if a 
cure short of destruction were possible, from taking 
the necessary steps, however drastic. The only dif- 
ference that sympathy and a knowledge of the cause 
of the disease would make to the owner would be to 
fill him with pity for his former companion ; they 
would not weaken his determination or unnerve his 
arm. The more he loved his dog, the more he remem- 
bered of his earlier steadfastness, the steadier would 
be his aim when he shot him. Half-measures are 






GERMANY 83 

impossible, excitement or flurry might cause bungling, 
infection with the sufferer's madness would mean 
ruin for all. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc said in a lecture 
at Sheffield, M The only possible solution is the entire 
destruction of the German military machine and ideal 
of government. ,, 

It is useless to argue with madmen, I know, yet 
nevertheless I cannot resist the temptation to make 
one point. If war is all that the Germans claim 
that it is, we and our Allies are doing Germany a 
good turn in giving her the opportunity of develop- 
ing her warlike qualities at our expense. It takes two 
to make a quarrel ; and instead of trying to prove 
that England and Russia are really responsible for the 
war, as the Germans are trying to do in the United 
States and elsewhere, the Germans should have the 
courage of their convictions and boldly claim the 
war as their own, as it undoubtedly is. They have 
been very bold in proclaiming their plans for aggres- 
sion before the war ; let them keep it up now that the 
actual fighting has begun. Let the Kaiser say in 191 4 
what the Empress Eugenie did not fear to say in 1870, 
" This is my war." They are welcome to the glory. 
All this preliminary shouting of theirs about what 
they mean to do seems to me a proof of their mad- 
ness — their method of letting their neighbours know 
they were " not right " ; but simply because their 
shouts were largely unintelligible and incredible to us, 
as madmen's shouts are apt to be, we ignored them, 
until it was too late ; and now we are engaged in a 
supreme effort to put our neighbour in a strait-jacket, 
for this is a better metaphor than the pistolling of a 
mad dog. The Germans loudly and honestly pro- 
claimed their intentions and their ideals. It is not 
their fault if we are shocked and grieved when they 
proceed to act upon them. It is, on the contrary, 
largely our own for having always assumed that men 
and nations never act on their theories and seldom 



84 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

mean what they say. We know as little of the real 
Germany as Germany knows of the real England. 
Yet the story of Zabern was well known in England, 
only England, with the levity which comes from 
safety, closed her eyes to its significance. 

The strength of the stimulus which Germany 
administers to her soldiers is to be explained in 
another way, I think, besides the fanatical fury of 
the war spirit. The German has always seemed to 
me to be soft metal, easily moulded, easily led. The 
Germans easily lose their sense of nationality, espe- 
cially when they emigrate ; the English, on the 
other hand, tend to impress others with their own 
characteristics. The Germans are digestible, the 
English are digesters, like the Romans. Despite the 
width of their knowledge and the extent of their 
education, the Germans seem lacking in self-reliance ; 
and thus we find that Bernhardi is always preaching 
the need of individuality and initiative in both the 
Army and the school. A works manager told me 
that he once had a group of workmen over from 
Germany for a particular piece of w r ork, and all these 
men maintained that they understood no English till 
their foreman came up and told them exactly what 
they had to do. Then they all felt free to talk — in 
English for the most part — without running any risk 
of making mistakes. An Englishman, on the other 
hand, sent abroad probably has a look at his job and 
is in at it without a word to or from anybody before 
the foreigners have satisfied their curiosity concern- 
ing him. 

Now I believe that in magnetism soft iron can 
be made into a very powerful magnet so long as 
the current of electricity continues to pass round it ; 
as soon as the current is cut off the magnetic con- 
dition also disappears, w r hereas harder iron and steel 
retain their magnetic condition permanently under 
ordinary circumstances. I often wonder whether the 



GERMANY 85 

iron crosses which the Kaiser sends out by the 
barrow-load to stimulate his troops are made of hard 
or soft iron — at any rate, they are not steel. So it 
seems to me it is with the Germans. Their soft, gentle, 
malleable natures are a real danger to Europe, since 
they render the Germans admirable material for the 
drill-sergeant to mould into shape, and then for the 
officer caste — the dynamo of the German Government 
as well as of the Army — to stimulate to hectic and 
practically to automatic and subconscious activity, 
but hardly the resistless rush of a really martial 
people. " Expand or explode " is a motto only 
for an explosive people, not of a people in " iron- 
bound ranks from which all that was individual was 
sternly excluded in favour of a massed effect," as 
Walter Bloem says in his story, " The Iron Year." 
They have already contrasted their stiffness with the 
disciplined freedom and individuality of the British 
infantry, whose use of the rifle — the freeman's weapon 
—seems to them to resemble the firing of a machine- 
gun, and whose taking of cover seems a sort of 
miracle. A maddened, brutalized, and repressed 
soldiery, bullied during drill and driven into action 
by methods the German officers know best, are only 
too likely, when left to themselves, to practise on 
others the brutalities they have suffered at the hands 
of their officers ; their own frayed and jagged nerves 
react and produce atrocities as it were by reflex 
action. The sugar of their nature has been fermented 
into alcohol. Nor do the rulers object to this 
brutality on occasion. In principle they approve it ; 
and in ordinary life they practise it, as witness the 
fierce stodginess of the students' mensurs or duels, 
and the number of duelling officers one sees shut up 
in a place like Ehrenbreitstein. War is no prize- 
fight, we all know, as all who have watched French 
or German soldiers drilling or marching realize. 
There are no rounds in the supreme international 



86 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

contest, no umpires to call u time/' and if you are 
out for victory, which shall be so complete as to 
make criticism of your methods by outsiders futile, 
or else for defeat, which means annihilation, after 
which, being dead, you care nothing for anybody's 
opinion, you may be strongly tempted to adopt any 
measures that seem to serve your purpose for the 
moment. 

Nevertheless, there are certain conventions which 
have grown up as regards the carrying on of the 
struggle — the public law of Europe — and although 
any combatant is at liberty to repudiate these con- 
ventions if he so wishes, he repudiates them under 
this risk : that he himself is liable to reprisals, and 
should he be worsted his fate may be rendered hard 
in proportion to the conventions he has ignored — a 
better phrase perhaps than " the laws he has broken ' 
— for there are, strictly speaking, no such things as 
international laws because there is no international 
body to enforce them. 

Of course we have heard that " necessity knows no 
law," and also that " nothing succeeds like success." 
Then, too, there is that pithy old couplet which 
runs thus : — 

Treason ne'er thrives, and that for just this reason : 
When it succeeds then none dare call it treason. 

Germany may argue that the necessity she was under 
to finish off France at lightning speed in order that 
she might then get round and tackle Russia is her 
justification for her attempt to buy English neutrality 
at the price of her shame, for her invasion of 
neutral Belgium, for her cruelties, atrocities, and 
vandalisms in both the countries she has invaded. 
She may argue that Brussels yielded because of the 
awful example of Louvain, just as Cromwell might 
have argued that Drogheda and Wexford shortened 



GERMANY 87 

the horrors of the Irish War and left him free to 
deal with the Scots, and that it is all very well 
for England, who, having all she needs and sitting 
comfortably behind her " mitigated sea " — as 
William Watson calls it — and the navies it 
carries, can afford to wage war generously, to 
hold up her hands in horror at what Germany has 
done ; but is England absolutely certain that, faced 
with similar necessities, she would refrain from 
similar courses? Did she not carry off the fleet 
of neutral Denmark in 1807 — Bernhardi points out 
— to prevent it from falling into the hands of 
Napoleon? Does England really prefer the dragging 
methods of Mountjoy to the sharp methods of the 
Protector? Are Drogheda and Wexford really worse 
than the dead in the Irish ditches, their mouths 
green with the nettles that had been their only food 
after Mountjoy had passed? 

Now such arguments are not easy to controvert. 
There is but one effective reply to them, and it is 
this : Since Germany appeals to force, she must 
abide by the arbitrament of force ; if she points 
to success as justifying all that she has done, we 
must obviously see to it that she does not succeed 
ultimately and finally. For German success means 
the throwing down of all the conventions or universal 
agreements which we call civilization and the rever- 
sion of human society to the ethics of the tiger 
and the ape. Thus it appears to me that a resistance 
to German aggression based on knowledge of German 
history and ideals is so much sounder and more 
reliable and will go so much farther than a resist- 
ance based merely on the excitement of recruiting 
meetings and atrocity stories in the newspapers — 
an excitement which is by no means identical with 
the real passion that leads to victory. Treitschke 
wrote thus of Frederick the Great : M Frederick the 
Great was all his life charged with treachery because 



88 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

no treaty or alliance could ever induce him to 
renounce the right of self-determination." To 
Frederick, that is to say, treaties were like piecrust 
— made to be broken. We must force ourselves 
to realize that terror and brutality are the weapons 
of a stupid people, too unintelligent or too panic- 
stricken — or too hectoring — to adopt the methods 
which built up the Roman and the British Empires. 
Whereas Edward I asked the Welsh to accept a 
prince who could not speak a word of English, the 
German asks the foreign traveller to write his name 
and address on the hotel police -form in German 
characters — in its way as barbarous, because as 
senseless and unnecessary, as the shelling of Reims 
Cathedral or the burning of the Louvain Library. 

All the excessive emphasis of which Germany has 
been guilty of late may, it is true, be only a sort 
of loud whistling to keep her courage up ; but the 
whistling has grown so loud and so distracting of 
late — it has drowned so many still, small voices and 
prevented Germany herself from hearing so many 
truths that she could not afford to miss — that it 
is high time we called " Silence ! " in a voice that 
even the desperate whistler herself shall hear. For 
a victorious Germany means the rule of stupidity, 
the rule of people who can think only of snatching 
what they want and living by word of command, 
the rule of a people who know no other method 
but that of force and terror. The French Reign of 
Terror was a thundercloud charged with blessings 
for mankind. The German reign of terror with 
which we are threatened would be a desert which 
the jack-booted tyrant of Brandenburg would call 
Peace. 



Ill 

CULTURE 

Having seen how Germany grew and the sources 
from which she draws her war spirit, we have 
now to consider briefly whether the German claim 
that the world conquest she is after will result in 
the spread of a superior civilization of German origin 
will bear examination. If it will, then perhaps 
Germany has justified her aggression, after all ; if 
it will not, then nothing is left of the German case. 
Now nobody can travel through Germany and 
remain blind to the importance which the Germans 
attach to many matters about which we in England 
are neglectful and indifferent ; not matters like 
National Insurance, in which we have been apt to 
copy the Germans too slavishly — one good result 
of the war will be that it will put a stop, I hope, 
to this uncritical borrowing from Germany — but 
matters to which I have already alluded incidentally 
when I was speaking of the admirable way in which 
Germany avoided the evils of our own industrial 
system and preserved the mediaeval character of so 
many of her ancient cities. In Germany continuity 
with the past has been jealously preserved. In 
England it has been ignorantly destroyed by short- 
sighted, practical men in a hurry to get rich — even 
at the expense of national well-being. In Germany 

individual enterprise has been regulated in the 

8 9 



9 o THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

interests of the State. In England it has been let 
loose to work its own will regardless of existing 
institutions ; our nineteenth-century utilitarianism 
was far more destructive than even the German guns 
at Reims. 

All that comes from keeping in touch with one's 
own past line of development, all that comes from 
living in a city with the unbroken traditions of 
Niiremburg or Frankfort — cities which were in earlier 
days self-governing and self-contained city republics 
embedded in the heart of Germany — is the daily 
lot of the modern German. 

And his education enables him to appreciate it. 
Even the technical training is glorified and enriched 
with history. Thus the barber apprentices of Munich 
are taught in the continuation schools not only how 
to strop and lather, how to keep the brushes and 
bowls clean, how to tell good material from bad 
— and we realize how important all this is when 
we think of the evils which an ill-kept barber's 
shop may so easily spread throughout the com- 
munity — but they are also told the meaning of the 
bleeding-dish which hangs as a sign before their 
doors ; how it proves that in the days when bleeding 
was regarded as a cure-all method they were in 
reality one branch of the profession which in its 
other branch has developed into the surgeons, that 
barbers are really barber-surgeons and that shaving 
is really a surgical operation. Then, again, the 
older apprentice is taught the various styles of 
historic hairdressing and the various wigs of different 
periods. Thus he becomes an artist and a man 
of science as well as a tradesman, and his talk 
with his customers is not necessarily confined to 
prize-fights and horse-races. 

As another instance of dignifying the present by 
linking it with the traditions and customs of the 
past I will describe a scene I once witnessed in 



GERMANY 91 

Heidelberg. Along its main street came a pro- 
cession of open carriages, each with three men in 
it. All were dressed in the semi-military costume 
of the German Student Corps : white buckskin 
breeches, topboots, and laced coats. Two bore the 
duelling-swords of the Corps and the third its banner. 
Following the procession, I found that it was making 
for the cemetery, and when I got there I came 
upon a most imposing sight. A professor was about 
to be buried, and the whole of the avenue was 
lined with these Corps officers, with their student 
members behind them. After the coffin had been 
lowered each trio advanced to the graveside, the 
two swordbearers crossed their swords over the 
hollow while the flagbearer dipped his flag thrice 
over the crossed swords into the grave. Then all 
three saluted the mourners and gave place to the 
officers of the next Corps. Thus once again was 
forced upon me a revision of my ideas on German 
institutions ; for although the faces of the Corps 
officers bore many a duelling scar and those of 
others bore traces of the drinking side of Corps 
life — a side which the Kaiser recently discounte- 
nanced in characteristic manner by giving selected 
topers a good talking-to himself — yet the Corps 
on this occasion presented as effective a ceremony 
as I have ever seen. 

I have suggested that education plays a very much 
greater part in Germany than it does with us. The 
Germans believe in education ; we don't ; and educa- 
tion brings rewards in Germany which it never brings 
in England. For instance, a boy who has reached 
a certain standard escapes half his military service, 
and consequently school progress is a matter of 
almost painful interest not only to the boy himself 
but also to his whole family. Indeed, the pressure 
proves every year too much for hundreds of German 
schoolboys, and year by year the number of school- 



92 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

boy suicides is rising in consequence. The girls are 
given an equally thorough domestic training. 
English girls brought face to face with the con- 
tinuous hard work of a German household have, as 
a rule, the shock of their lives. The carrying of 
heavy market-baskets, the bringing home of fir-cones 
in bags, pockets, and even umbrellas from country 
walks to feed the stove and save the fuel, the 
economy and industry of it all are almost appalling 
to them. The success also of technical education 
in Germany is unquestioned, of course ; but it is 
on another aspect of education — an aspect unthought 
of in England — that I wish to dw^ell. We in England 
think of education as an affair of little children — 
with perhaps continued training for a small number 
of favoured adolescents. But by the time that people 
reach their twenties we concern ourselves no more 
with their education — although, I am glad to say, 
they are showing every year through Adult Schools, 
the Workers' Educational Association, and some sides 
of the Evening Schools an ever-increasing determi- 
nation to educate themselves. 

Now what does Germany do for the adults? She 
does not make the mistake we might expect her 
to make : order them off to the schoolroom after 
work in the evening, whether they wish it or no. 
She does not do that ; but she does this : she 
educates them through their recreations. Now with 
us in England amusement is a matter of business ; 
public entertainments are run for profit : the public 
is given what the managers think it wants ; in 
Germany, and all over the Continent as a matter 
of fact, the theatre is a public institution : not every 
theatre, but one theatre at least in each big town. 
The Corporation loses hundreds, probably thousands, 
of pounds a year upon the State theatre, and is 
content to lose — as also upon State opera and music 
— for the same reason that we are willing to lose 



GERMANY 93 

upon our schools and libraries, to support which 
we levy local rates : because the theatre is as truly 
educational as the school and the library — and 
perhaps even more effective since it presents educa- 
tion in the guise of recreation. The State makes 
it its business to supply ideas — or rather to open 
up the great sources of ideas — for the benefit of 
the adults ; and much of the alertness of the German 
manufacturer and the open-mindedness of the German 
workman is due doubtless to the fact that they have 
kept their minds in training by exercising them on 
the ideas rendered available by the public support 
of drama, literature, and art ; whereas the English 
manufacturer has only his golf and his motor-car 
to occupy his leisure — with perhaps an occasional 
musical comedy or third-rate novel ; while the 
British workman has to find what mental sustenance 
he can in football, fishing, boxing, and racing as 
conveyed to him chiefly in the columns of the half- 
penny Press, with perhaps " The Will of Kaiser Bill " 
by way of comic relief. The consequence is that 
both masters and men tend to " wither at the top " 
and to lose the brain-power required for remoulding 
their methods in face of intelligent German com- 
petition. 

The State fostering of thought and intelligence 
under the form of recreation thus probably pays for 
itself many times over in the increased economic 
efficiency of the workers. But in another respect 
also the State is the gainer from the State theatre. 
.We have heard a great deal of late about caste 
in Germany — and the military caste is of course 
a great fact, perhaps the greatest fact, in Germany 
to-day. But the German theatre is far less caste- 
ridden than is our own. The most striking part 
of the German theatre is the foyer or large entrance- 
hall, with its staircases, buffets, and corridors. Now 
during the entr'actes at a German theatre the whole 



94 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

house leaves its seats and troops down or out, as 
the case may be, to the foyer and its bars. Thus 
is secured a real mingling of the classes, a real 
fusion of social grades in the common interest in 
art, which we in England have never yet been able 
to achieve. In contrast with a corresponding German 
audience the audience in a provincial English theatre 
is often lamentably deficient in deportment. Not 
only do people in pit and gallery often explain to 
each other what is going on behind the footlights 
— somewhat after the manner of a Greek chorus, to 
the distraction of those within earshot — but if a play 
contains any daring situations or local touches, as, 
e.g., in " H indie Wakes,' ' the audience shrieks so 
loudly with delight that the " packers-up ' in the 
pit have to shout " Order, order ! " at frequent 
intervals. 

The German theatre is also free from those twin 
nuisances and hindrances to British drama, the actor- 
manager and the long run. Each German theatre 
has its company and its repertoire of plays, which 
is continually increased by additions from among 
the best modern productions. Thus the German 
theatre-goer has the chance of getting to know a 
far larger number of great plays and poems than 
has the English theatre-goer, even though he live 
in London. The same is true of German music. 

But perhaps the most remarkable fact about the 
German theatre is the attention it pays to foreign 
drama, and English in particular. The Germans 
claim that Shakespeare is really a German, born 
by accident on the wrong side of the North Sea ; 
and if we are to judge by the relative treatment 
he has received in Germany and in his native land, 
till recently at any rate, the Germans have a good 
case. 

It is difficult to go into a German town without 
seeing a Shakespeare play advertised : more 



GERMANY 95 

Shakespeare plays are performed in Germany than 
in England, where Mr. William Poel — whose work 
has received but scanty public recognition — holds 
the record ; the number of actual performances 
is many times greater. In September, 19 14, 
" Henry V " was actually played as a patriotic 
drama at Berlin. Can we imagine Schiller's " Wal- 
lenstein " at His Majesty's in the same autumn? 
And they are performed more seriously — with a 
greater regard, I mean, to the words and spirit of 
Shakespeare himself. When, for instance, a popular 
London actor-manager produced " King John ' he 
actually included a tableau of King John signing 
the Magna Charta simply because the fact is men- 
tioned in Little Arthur's History of England and 
others. The fact that Shakespeare would have 
regarded Magna Charta as a piece of presumption 
on the part of the barons had no deterrent effect 
on him. We are fortunate, indeed, that he did not 
set out to put his Magna Charta scene in words 
and thus add to Shakespeare to satisfy a British 
weakness. In " The Tempest " he played with a 
fire-hose on a solidly built ship swung on rockers. 
But it was only when he took six plays to Berlin 
at the invitation of the Kaiser that the real contrast 
between the German and the English view of Shake- 
speare became evident. This particular actor-manager 
likes his plays sumptuous. I remember a review 
of his " Hejiry VIII " which was written simply in 
the form of a catalogue — item, one palace ; item, 
one Cardinal's robe ; and so forth — and that in an 
English critical weekly. Well, when he took his 
plays to Berlin the elaboration of his mountings 
quite overcame the Berlin scene- shifters, and it is 
said that during the entr'actes, while the audience 
were criticizing his performance in the foyer, he him- 
self was frantically struggling with the next set of 
scenery. The views of the German critics were at 



96 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

first strongly expressed ; doubtless they were dis- 
appointed at not seeing him at his real work behind 
the curtain ; but later they became more tolerant 
— possibly at a hint from some august person who 
was at that time anxious for a good understanding 
with England. 

I think that the Germans may claim, then, that 
they have given much thought to the drama and 
have reaped their reward. The same is equally 
true of music, in which the German genius expresses 
itself most happily and naturally. But German music 
is so great that it needs no more than a passing 
mention. All that I will say is that I was delighted 
when the Queen's Hall Orchestra restored Wagner 
to its programme after the war had been in progress 
a week or two and when the proprietors had 
realized that no riot would result. 

In the plastic arts, so far as I who know little 
of them can judge, the same careful, conscientious, 
and critical attitude — of a marshalled and disciplined 
kind — on the part of the general public is observable. 

When first I knew the Basilica of Aachen (Aix- 
la-Chapelle) it was in the rough, just as Charlemagne 
had left it. When I saw it last time I was sur- 
prised to see that the work had been finished — after 
an interval of eleven hundred years. The whole 
of the interior was covered with mosaics, as they 
are gradually covering the interior of the new Roman 
Catholic Cathedral at Westminster. When I reached 
home I spoke of what I had seen to a friend. He 
was much interested and showed me several book- 
lets, costing one or two marks each, illustrated with 
photographs. These books were the pamphlets that 
the two parties, for and against the mosaics, had 
been firing into each other ; and they had scoured 
Egypt, Syria, and the Balkans for their ammunition : 
their photos of mosaics and decorations from churches 
throughout the Near East. 



GERMANY 97 

A similar work of decoration was recently under- 
taken in London. Sir W. B. Richmond covered 
several hundred square yards of St. Paul's Cathedral 
with mosaics and nobody troubled to criticize him — 
perhaps his work is above criticism ; but when the 
decorators began to stencil patterns in red paint 
on the stonework public opinion was at last moved 
to protest and the paint had to be scrubbed off 
again, but if one knows where to look one may still 
see its faint traces. 

In other restorations — for instance, at Heidelberg, 
at the Roman camp near Homburg, the Saalburg, and 
at the Rhine Castle the Marksburg — the same anxiety 
to be correct is observable ; but frequently the effect, 
though the result of absolutely sound and honest and 
painstaking work, is unfortunate. The restored por- 
tion of the Heidelberg Castle in particular seems 
to me to spoil the general effect completely. It 
looks as though a hotel had been built in the midst 
of the ruins and decorated throughout with gaudy 
frescoes. Among the Germans themselves, however, 
I must admit that the most popular sight at Heidel- 
berg seems to be the Great Tun, together with the 
fox's brush that bobs out at you unexpectedly in the 
same room — the trick of some jester of the Elector- 
Palatine's Court. In the Saalburg, similarly, I went 
up to what I took from a distance to be a row of 
machine-guns. So they were ; they were working 
models of ancient Roman catapults of one sort and 
another. I remember also the smooth working of 
the Marksburg drawbridge. 

This same careful, reverent spirit has in the world 
of science and criticism given German scholars the 
lead in all that can be accomplished by diligence; 
and thoroughness ; while the fine effectiveness of 
the German educational system has provided the 
leaders in every branch of science, art, literature, 
industry, and commerce with a supply of trained 

7 



98 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

subordinates such as no other country — least of all 
England — can show. I have known a German girl 
steadily prepare herself for a concert by playing 
through the compositions to be performed, practically 
making her own analytical programme for herself. 
The whole land is, moreover, freer than we are from 
the restrictions and checks on private conduct which 
we inherit from Puritanism but which we attribute 
to Mrs. Grundy. 

All this is to the good, and it goes a very long way, 
but not all the way. The machinery, the trained 
intelligence, the disciplined appreciation are there 
in admirable order. Culture, like all else German, 
has been organized. But has the body been inspired 
— made to live? In music and in philosophy? Yes. 
But in other directions? The answer must be, found 
in this fact, that ever since a national life began to 
stir in Germany and the old local arts and crafts, like 
those practised so exquisitely in Niiremburg and other 
cities throughout the Middle Ages, were superseded 
by efforts on a larger scale, Germany has been a 
borrower rather than an originator. Her genius 
to-day lies rather in arranging the great works of the 
past in excellent order — as w r e may see in the National 
Museums in Niiremburg and Munich — than in pro- 
ducing the great works themselves for future ages 
to arrange and admire. 

At the beginning of her career as a kingdom in the 
early seventeen hundreds, Prussia — and with Prussia 
most of Germany as well — was bound to the chariot - 
wheels of French convention in the Arts ; and when 
Lessing in his great work on behalf of the Hamburg 
Theatre later in the same century cut these bonds 
he freed German art and literature from France — to 
what end? To deliver them over to the tyranny of 
England. When he said that if Shakespeare did 
not conform to the rules of Louis XIV's Court poets, 
so much the worse for the rules ; when he gave one 



GERMANY 99 

of his plays the very English title of " Miss Sarah 
Simpson " (it reminds one slightly of M Clarissa 
Harlow ") he was simply revealing the nakedness of 
his native land. The Sturm und Drang period which 
succeeded him — and disgusted him — was merely 
Shakespeare caricatured ; and Schiller turned to 
France for his exquisitely sympathetic Maid of 
Orleans, to Scotland for his Marie Stuart, to Switzer- 
land for his William Tell. " Wallenstein " is of 
course German enough in theme, as is also Goethe's 
early " Gotz von Berlichingen," but both these are 
dramas of a divided Germany — of a Germany plunged 
into religious and agrarian civil war. Goethe's 
"Faust' is also quite German, but really because 
its interests and speculations, though German in form 
and setting, are world-wide in their appeal, and 
universality was the character of German thought in 
the eighteenth century. Goethe was a " good Euro- 
pean " first — the phrase is Nietzsche's — a German only 
in the second place, and the German character of 
his writing adds only to its attractiveness ; it in 
nowise lessens the universality of its appeal. When 
the Weimar folk wished to do him peculiar honour 
on the jubilee of his coming among them, they per- 
formed his classic " Iphigenia " at the theatre of 
which he was director and for which he had done so 
much work that will live. 

This power of appreciating and adapting the work 
of others is seen in other spheres as well. I 
remember seeing in Manchester some of the plays 
which Gordon Craig designed for his mother, Ellen 
Terry, and I well remember the comments of the 
pittites round about me. They were pitying Ellen 
Terry, pitying her because she had, as they said, 
" come to this " after all the glorious upholstery of 
her partnership with Irving. To the British play- 
goers Craig's severity seemed merely thin and cheap ; 
they had no conception of the beauty of sheer sim- 



ioo THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

plicity and absolute necessity — the beauty, for 
instance, of a purely utilitarian object like the human 
body ; so he went abroad and found a welcome in — 
Moscow ! where his " Hamlet " was rehearsed for 
a whole year before it was offered to the public by 
the Art Theatre Company. From Moscow his 
influence spread to Germany, where it woke a sympa- 
thetic chord in the work of Max Reinhardt, the 
director of the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin. Gradu- 
ally Reinhardt began to feel his way into England, 
or, to be more exact, London (the two are not 
synonymous), and at last he burst upon us and capti- 
vated us with " The Miracle " at Olympia. Thus 
we were allowed to come in at the tail of a movement 
which we could have led, since we had the first offer, 
but lacked the widespread general taste which enabled 
even the Muscovites to see the value and importance 
of Craig's work. 

This power of development and adaptation is to be 
seen also in the capture of the dye trade. The 
English, indeed, originated the processes, but the 
Germans made them commercial successes ; and our 
punishment is that to-day, I understand, the supply 
of khaki has given out through the exhaustion of the 
stock of German dyes of the right colour. On the 
unworthy side these same powers are devoted to 
the production of cheap imitations of sound English 
goods and the forging of English trade -marks to 
deceive customers as to their real origin and nature. 
But this is only the corruption of the best which 
becomes the worst. 

iWe can then, I think, freely acknowledge that 
there is a German culture, and that it reached its 
height in little places like Weimar, about which 
Thackeray wrote so appreciatively. But the gentle- 
ness and peace which so attracted him are hardly the 
source of such creative energy as shall overwhelm 
the world with a new Renaissance. The same quali- 



GERMANY 101 

ties, in short, which make the German a docile 
soldier make him also a steady believer in culture : 
the receptivity and submission to authority which we 
have already noted in other connections. It is only 
when this amiable simplicity is galvanized by the 
crude energy of a newly fledged national enthusiasm 
that it commits atrocities on the artistic side com- 
parable only to the atrocities of the invading armies 
which burn Louvain and bombard Reims. I have 
already referred to the Leipsic monument. That 
grotesque mass is not to be mentioned beside the 
serene beauty of Goethe's house in the Place at 
Weimar as I saw it a few years back, with all the 
poet's engravings and statues, his books and 
apparatus, even the bed on which he died, crying for 
" more light," just as he had left them. And yet the 
two are within a short hour's run of each other. A 
little place like Weimar is in many ways far more 
truly the capital of Germany than the noisy and 
feverish Berlin, which seems so to intoxicate the 
Kaiser ; and it is the art which emanates from the 
Imperialism of the capital which is so bad — the Sieges 
Allee statues and so on. Even music seems to have 
caught the infection, and we recognize once more 
the familiar note of brutal realism in the scratching 
music of Electra's unearthing of the Axe in Strauss' 
opera — originality overstraining itself and becoming 
mere ugliness. And again, South Germany — sunny 
and art -loving Munich even — tolerates a flat-footed 
ferocity in some of the Jugend cartoons — to say 
nothing of its famous Hate Song against England — 
which is the very reverse of the Bavarian character. 
Now it is this Grenadier become artist — we have 
already seen him disguised as a schoolmaster — that 
the real lovers of German culture detest and fear. 
Even Nietzsche, whose influence is usually regarded 
as all on the side of hardness and brutality, con- 
demned the newer growth which miscalled itself 



102 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

culture. He objected to the sort of stuff which 
Treitschke gave forth on the death of the Emperor 
Frederick : — 

44 The time must one day come when the peoples 
shall feel that the battles of the Emperor William I 
not only created a Fatherland for the Germans but 
also bestowed upon the community of the nations 
a juster and more reasonable order. Then will be 
fulfilled what once Emmanuel Geibel sang to the 
grey -haired victor : * And the world will one day 
find healing at the touch of the German character.' " 

Of Treitschke himself Nietzsche said that he had 
44 completely lost sight of the notion of culture/' while 
of German culture — new style — he said : 44 I look 
down on German culture with undisguised contempt. 
Without either sense or substance or goal, it is simply 
public opinion. There could be no more dangerous 
misunderstanding than to suppose that Germany's 
success at arms proved anything in favour of German 
culture — and still less the triumph of that culture over 
France." After all, then, Versailles was greater than 
the Emperor who was crowned there in 1870. Heine 
— whose house in Craven Street, London, may still 
be seen — had even stronger feelings about the 
Junkerism which was masquerading as German cul- 
ture even in his day. In <4 Deutschland " he gives 
an account of his return to Germany after thirteen 
years' absence : — 

At Aachen on the posthouse shield 

I saw the bird again 
That I so hate ! It glared on me 

With poisonous disdain. 

Thou loathly fowl ! if ever thou 

Into my hands shouldst fall, 
I'll pluck thy feathers and hack off 

Thy talons, one and all. 



GERMANY 103 

I'll nail thee to a lofty pole, 

Thou'lt make a target fine ; 
And to a shooting match I'll call 

The bowmen of the Rhine. 



Still more terrible, because so much more prophetic, 
is the passage in which Heine says that Germain 
culture would inevitably draw to an end by the 
bombardment of Christian cathedrals. And last of all 
I would call attention to a passage from Schiller — 
the writer of the " Maid of Orleans " who crowned 
Charles VII in Reims — in which he says : " The 
fall of the Empire does not mean the fall of German 
greatness." Of course not. The rise of the present 
Empire marked the decline of German greatness in 
the Arts ; its fall may be the first step towards a 
happier and more rational development of German 
culture. A certain strain of military sternness is 
strengthening to a civilization, but a State which is 
all backbone is, by hypothesis, without either heart or 
head. 

Throughout this subject of German culture I have 
been careful to distinguish between the real and the 
spurious, between the culture which appealed to 
Carlyle and Thackeray and that which appealed to 
Treitschke, who seemed to think, with so many other 
Germans, that genius could be organized and regi- 
mented and forced by machinery into existence — 
thereby suggesting that he and they have no real 
conception of its nature, and have therefore no real 
message to the world either in the arts or in govern- 
ment. 

Leaving German State art, then, as merely a mani- 
festation of German materialism and Imperialism, 
it yet seems to me that the enemy has a good deal 
to teach us in the matter of fostering our national 
art and literature. And we should do well to ponder 
what he has to teach, because when the time for 



104 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

settlement comes the forces which will tell will be, 
not only the armed forces of the various States but 
also the force of ideas and enlightenment which 
each of the victors can put into the field. Have we 
begun to mobilize these forces yet? Have we begun 
to think seriously and effectively about the problems 
the war is opening up both at home and abroad — or, 
indeed, about any problems? Have we realized that 
after the war we shall need brains similar to those 
which reorganized Prussia in the early nineteenth 
century, and that the one -step which is enough for 
the ordinary Englishman must soon become a two- 
step, if not a regular hop, skip, and jump, however 
disturbing it may be to our liver and our dignity? 
Have we begun to toughen our mental fibre by hard 
thinking and hard reading, as Kitchener's Armies are 
toughening their muscles by Swedish — not British — 
gymnastics? Are we sure that our security behind an 
invincible Navy has not produced a slackness and a 
frivolity of mind, an unwillingness to tackle problems 
which need concentrated thinking or which raise 
terrible imaginings ; or to read, not skim, books 
which — like Bernhardt " Germany and the Next 
War," with its motto from Nietzsche, " War and 
courage have done more great things than love 
of the neighbour " — are not only a bit stiff but also 
more than a little shocking to our pet ethics and 
favourite prepossessions ; or to combat conclusions 
such as these : " What is more harmful than any 
vice? Practical sympathy with the botched and weak 
— Christianity," " Christian altruism is the mob 
egoism of the weak "? 

If we have learned to criticize ourselves on these 
lines and to check the faults which our self-criticism 
reveals, then this war will not have been fought in 
vain. We must oppose the all-round self-discipline 
of a free people to the all-round organization pf 
regimented Germany. 



SECOND ESSAY 

FRANCE: THE PIONEER OF CIVILIZATION 

At the end of my last essay I quoted a passage 
from Nietzsche, in which he said that the success of 
German arms proved nothing in favour of German 
culture, and still less the triumph of that culture over 
France. 

I propose now to take this as the text of the 
present section of my subject. 

In going as fully into German history as we have 
done, we have cleared most of the historical facts we 
need for our purpose out of the way. All these facts 
have other facets, of course, each facet turned towards 
a different State and forming part of that State's 
history : but, for the most part, these facets are only 
the converse of the facets we have already seen 
from the point of view of German history, and there- 
fore require nothing more than an incidental notice 
from us. 

I shall not, then, concern myself so fully with French 

history as I did with German history, because to do 

so would be simply waste of time in repetition. 

There is, moreover, a more vital point of view from 

which to tell the French story. But before I begin 

it, I do not wish to suggest that because I propose 

to touch but lightly on French history the history 

of France is of less importance than that of Germany. 

Far otherwise. The history of Europe is, indeed, 

best treated as pivoting on that of France. Again 

105 



106 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and again France has been the outstanding fact in 
European history ; again and again has she emerged 
from a period of internal difficulty to compel once 
more the attention and admiration of Europe and 
direct her destinies. But it so happens that the 
real cause of the present war is the growth and situa- 
tion of Germany, and therefore the history we require 
had to be treated mainly from the point of view 
of German growth. I only wish it were unavoidable 
for me to tell the story of the growth of France ; 
of her inheritance through Gaul of all that Rome 
had left to the world ; of her central position ; of 
her work in reviving, north of the Alps, all that the 
Mediterranean had contributed to the well-being of 
mankind, and in adding still further to the glorious 
total. 

It is all far more brilliant and varied than the 
steady tramp of the Prussians through the last two 
centuries, but, as I have already said, we must be 
content with such glances at it as we can obtain by 
reflection from the history of Germany and the other 
States — including our own — with which France came 
into contact from time to time. 

If France has had her ups and downs during 
the nine centuries she has been a kingdom ; if she 
has been trampled down by Moors and English and 
Germans ; if, like Israel of old, she has repelled 
her foes under leaders who have appeared as provi- 
dentially as the Hebrew Judges (leaders like Charles 
the Hammer, Joan of Arc, Henry of Navarre, 
Napoleon) — nevertheless, from another point of view 
her influence on Europe has been steady and con- 
tinuous throughout her history. She has been the 
ever-flowing source of ideas and movements in 
Europe. 

We have seen that the German Empire was formed 
in 1870 at the expense of France. Similarly we 
might say that the French kingdom was effectually 



FRANCE 107 

established at the expense of England. Through- 
out the Hundred Years War France was a prey to 
the English, whose archers at Crecy and Poictiers 
— the English have always excelled in shooting — 
gave our island forces a superiority and English 
rule in France a continuity neither had done enough to 
deserve. France was held under easily by England 
because she was divided, whereas England had been 
united centuries earlier by the wonderful work of our 
Norman-French and French kings — William I, 
Henry I, and Henry II. French provinces were in 
reality almost rival States under the nominal rule 
of the French King, even as the States of Germany 
were practically independent units under the 
Emperor. 

But this period of division and consequent subjuga- 
tion to the more united power of England passed 
away when Joan of Arc drove the English from 
Orleans and so broke their prestige. When in the 
fated cathedral of Reims, and clad in white, she stood 
by the side of the ungrateful Dauphin she had raised 
to the throne, we may well imagine her the fairy 
godmother whose magic had created a united and 
living France from the remnants of the warring 
provinces that had been snatched back from England. 
It was the son (Louis XI) of the King she had 
crowned who first ruled a really united France. He 
was a contemporary of our Henry VII, and we have 
already referred to him in connection with Charles 
the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, " Quentin Durward," 
Villon, and Justin Huntley McCarthy's play " If 
I were King." 

But French influence begins long before the con- 
solidation of the French throne. Throughout the 
Middle Ages French ideas kept Europe busy and 
broke into the local particularism which was the 
great drawback of mediaeval society. More than one 
monastic order of importance arose in France ; the 



10S THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Carthusians, the Cluniacs, the Cistercians all had 
their headquarters in some French monastery or 
other. St. Bernard, whose hymn — 

Jesus, the very thought of Thee 
With sweetness fills my breast, 

is still sung in our churches, was the greatest force 
of his time ; he ordered kings and rulers about as 
if they were nothing more than schoolboys ; he inter- 
vened with effect among the rival Popes of his day ; 
and his struggles with Abelard have not even yet 
been forgotten. His Life, by Morrison, published by 
Macmillan, is one of the very best books for those 
to read who wish to see what the Middle Ages were 
like and what influence this Frenchman wielded even 
in the days of our Norman kings. 

One of St. Bernard's biggest efforts was the 
preaching of the Second Crusade. The First Crusade 
had also been preached, first of all at Clermont, on 
French soil, by Peter the Hermit, and, indeed, the 
whole of the crusading idea may be said with truth 
to be of French origin. I cannot of course dwell 
here on the results of these wonderful wars — the first 
and most effective Concert of Europe. Their influence 
in bringing European peoples together, breaking 
down barriers, opening up trade routes and estab- 
lishing international highways, planting ideas and 
spreading knowledge, leading off barons to a conse- 
crated death against the Moslems — this was St. 
Bernard's frank argument — and thus giving the sub- 
jects they left behind a chance of prospering and 
developing their own local self-government by the 
purchase of charters from needy crusaders ; the 
founding of the militant orders of the Templars and 
the Knights of St. John of Malta, the Hospitallers, 
who became our Red Cross Societies — all this and 
much more Europe owes to the French idea of the 



FRANCE 109 

Crusade. Nor is that all. Not every Crusade went 
eastward into the Holy Land. We have already, 
seen crusading knights conquering Prussia for 
Brandenburg ; now we have to notice that Portugal 
takes its rise from the attacks of French Crusaders 
who established themselves on the Tagus mouth, and 
using this as a base, drove back the Moors of Spain 
far enough to found a Christian kingdom on the coast. 

Another institution of vast importance to Europe 
which France can claim as her own is the University. 
Like the Crusades, the University was a unifying 
movement, a net spread all over Christendom to hold 
it together in the bonds of learning. 

The Church had already bound Europe together 
in the bonds of religion, and the mediaeval Universi- 
ties, with their scholastic philosophers and theo- 
logians, their Latin — the language of learning which 
old Rome had bequeathed alike to her spiritual 
successor the Roman Church and to her intellectual 
heir the University — helped also to strengthen this 
bond. Whatever differences of speech and custom 
might sever one mediaeval kingdom or duchy from 
another, the Churchman and the scholar were free 
to go wherever they wished, for everywhere they 
found a language and an organization to which they 
were accustomed. Europe was thus knit together 
by the scholars and Churchmen of the time. We 
find Alcuin from the Tyne teaching Charlemagne's 
Germans in the ninth century ; we find Theodore of 
St. Paul's city of Tarsus, in Asia Minor, settling a 
dispute between rival churches at Northumbrian 
Whitby as early as the seventh century ; we find 
French monks carrying the fiery cross throughout 
Europe and leading the cosmopolitan armies of the 
Crusades towards the tomb of Christ from the 
eleventh century onwards. 

Now Paris was the earliest and most important 
University to the north of the Alps. From it many 



no THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

other Universities were founded, while within its 
limits students of all races, grouped in " nations/' 
were to be found. Oxford, I believe, claims a 
separate foundation, and perhaps an even earlier one ; 
while Cambridge says, somewhat shamefacedly, that 
she believes she was founded a few hundreds of years 
B.C. by one Cantaber, King of Spain ! But, for all 
that, Paris may be regarded as the chief centre of 
European Universities. Abelard and Heloise, with 
St. Bernard, are certainly the chief names in the 
University world of the mediaeval period, and I think 
we may fairly claim to add the benefits which the 
Universities have conferred on Europe to those which 
the Crusades have conferred and put the total down 
to the credit of France. 

For yet one more glory Europe is indebted to 
France, and that glory is perhaps the greatest of 
all, since it is the triumph of the Middle Ages, the 
highest expression of our Christian civilization. It 
is nothing less than the Gothic cathedral. Now, 
when we come across the term Goth first it has 
associations similar to that of Vandal — Goths and 
Vandals alike were barbarians of the Dark Ages, yet 
nowadays the terms have very different connotations. 
Vandalism is still the term we apply to acts of wanton 
destruction, whereas Gothic has become a word to 
denote the highest achievement of Christian art. 
Perhaps a few words in explanation, then, of the word 
Gothic will not be out of place. I have nothing to 
say about vandalism ; the ruins of Louvain, the 
damage at Reims are eloquent without any words 
of mine. I referred in an earlier essay to Aachen 
Cathedral as being built in Byzantine style and as 
being finished, after a thousand years' delay, in gild- 
ing and mosaics such as one can see also being put 
up in Westminster Cathedral. That style of decora- 
tion is associated in our minds rather with expensive 
restaurants and ballrooms than with churches, it is 



FRANCE m 

true ; but during the Dark Ages it was the prevalent 
ecclesiastical style in the Mediterranean area — an area 
accustomed to the marble and colour of Greece and 
Rome. When, therefore, another style of church 
building appeared among the barbarians, the 
enlightened Europeans of the Eastern Empire and 
of Italy spoke of it contemptuously as merely bar- 
barous, the work of Goths — Gothic, in fact. 

Nevertheless, this despised style showed consider- 
able vitality, and the buildings which rose under its 
influence became year by year more elaborate and 
magnificent. I cannot here stop to tell the wonderful 
story of the building of these cathedrals, of the travel- 
ling guilds of Free-Masons, with the secret signs by 
which they knew each other, of the carvers in wood 
and stone, of the metal-workers, of the stained-glass 
window-makers, of the organ-builders ; but it is all 
specially interesting, in view of modern attempts of 
associated workmen in the building and other trades 
to take on big works direct without the intervention 
of a contractor. 

All I can say here — having just hinted at the 
interest of the subject of the cathedral -building 
guilds to the Syndicalist — is that, of all cathedrals 
in Europe, none surpassed and few approached in 
loveliness and majesty, in delicacy and in glory, in 
perfection of finish and variety of detail, the cathe- 
drals of Central France. Reims, Notre Dame at 
Paris, and a dozen more should be mentioned. But 
all I can do here is to suggest the reason for their 
artistic importance. For they are not merely noble 
and stately piles, with — 

Storied windows richly dight, 
Casting a dim religious light, 

as our own Milton — Puritan though he was — so finely 
described them ; they were also the embodiment ia 



ii2 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

stone of all that the Middle Ages held to be most 
important. They have been called frozen music. 
Yet they were used also for the most prosaic of 
purposes on occasion. Cattle were stalled in them, 
and wounded soldiers. Their towers were watch- 
towers against the enemy. Yet their chief significance 
was in the thought they symbolized. 

The first impression one gets of a Gothic church 
or cathedral is its wastefulness. Such big pillars,, 
such awkward seating arrangements, such poor light- 
ing, often such draughts ! Many an iron-girdered 
public -hall or big central mission is far better suited 
for the purposes of great religious gatherings than 
a Gothic cathedral. And yet if the architects of the 
cathedrals had only used their materials economically,, 
one is tempted to murmur, how much more convenient 
a meeting -place they could have built. The towers 
and the spires, the flying buttresses — how much 
stone they take up, and yet without increasing the 
accommodation. Think of filling the spire of 
Salisbury with layer above layer of worshippers, 
their feet all dangling above the heads of the row 
beneath ! But however long one continued in that 
strain of argument, one would make no impression 
whatever on the architect — a man as a rule unknown 
to fame — of a mediaeval cathedral. And why? Simply 
because he was not concerned about the convenience 
and the comfort of congregations, ventilators and 
draughts, good light and acoustics. He had some- 
thing else to remember. He had to remember that he 
was building a house of God. " My house shall be 
a house of prayer " had to be the ground -plan and 
elevation, the inspiring note, of his whole work. 
Man had to rise from earth to heaven, another Jacob's 
ladder had to be reared for the soul of man to climb ; 
hence the waste of material, the narrow floor-space 
but the soaring arch, the pinched -in aisle but the 
flying buttresses, the darkened spaces but the " cloud- 



FRANCE 113 

capped pinnacle " of the central spire. It is in this 
respect that so many German churches, with their 
bulbous additions, are so lacking. The highest point 
about these churches, the point one has to throw one's 
head back to see, reminds one of the turnip, honest 
and sound enough but uninspiring ; whereas even 
a modern Gothic spire dominates its area in a won- 
derful way. I well remember the discussion caused 
in Sheffield when St. Marie's, the Roman Catholic 
church, illuminated the cross at the top of its spire 
with green lights during George V's Coronation 
festivities. Fortunately, however, a still higher light 
was hoisted into position : the situation was saved 
by the red lamp which Vulcan held in his hand on the 
top of the Town Hall clock-tower. And this in a city 
which is proud of its connection with Ruskin ! 

This, then, is the supreme gift of mediaeval France 
— the Gothic cathedral, a new creation, not merely 
the transference of Mediterranean ideas to Northern 
Europe. Nor were the French overwhelmed with 
the greatness of the achievement, as a lesser people 
might have been. Having produced their miracle 
of stone, they proceeded to show that they were 
greater than the triumph they had created ; and 
so, to prevent the cathedral they had called into 
being from becoming too overpowering in its majesty, 
they trimmed it here and there with the quaintest 
touches of comic relief — gargoyles and, above all, 
grotesques, such as one sees high up on Notre 
Dame. The true spirit of France — the spirit of Irony 
— resides in the grinning yet meditative hobgoblin who 
looks from the parapet of Notre Dame, his chin in his 
hand, right across Paris. With this triple triumph, 
then — monasteries, crusades, universities, cathedrals 
(no, it is quadruple) — to her credit, we must turn 
from mediaeval France. 

During the troublous period of the Renaissance, 
and the Reformation we must leave France to work 

8 



n 4 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

her own way unattended. She had her religious 
factions and a bloody massacre on the eve of St. 
Bartholomew ; she had her Protestant King — Henry 
of Navarre — who nevertheless thought that Paris was 
worth a Mass ; and she had her dynastic troubles and 
her Royal Family squabbles, in some of which our 
own Mary Queen of Scots was involved. During 
this age of transition also her architecture underwent 
a change, but emerged triumphant once more in the 
glorious chateaux of Touraine and the Loire — almost 
as perfect an expression of the ideas of the Renais- 
sance as are the cathedrals those of an earlier age. 

As in England so in France the confusions and 
struggles of the Renaissance and the Reformation 
strengthened the central power, and henceforth the 
monarch became more and more absolute. Just as 
in " Quentin Durward " we may see the beginnings 
of French autocracy, so also in that remarkable series 
of Dumas, " The Three Musketeers " and its many 
sequels — a series dealing, I believe, with the same 
body of soldiers as " Quentin Durward," the King's 
bodyguard — we catch glimpses of its later growth. In 
the works of Richelieu and Mazarin we see the steady 
building up of the royal power by the professional 
politicians, who disguised themselves under the robes 
of cardinals ; we see the King's Ministers bullying 
or bribing or cajoling or compelling noble after 
noble to relinquish his voice in the Government and 
to be content with the untaxed ease and pleasure 
of his Renaissance chateau. .We see the process 
going on from the day when the French Princess 
Henrietta Maria goaded her unlucky husband, 
Charles I of England, into the desperate action which 
led him to the block by her constant taunt, " Be 
a King " (like my father in France), to the day 
when Louis XIV, le Grand Monarque, le Roi Soleil, 
looking over Paris, "la Ville Lumiere/' from Ver- 
sailles, could say with perfect truth : Uetat c'est 



FRANCE 115 

moi (" I am the State "), and the work of strengthen- 
ing the throne stood complete. Paris focused 
France, Versailles — which had cost twenty millions — 
focused Paris, and Louis focused Versailles. We 
cannot understand France at its height until we have 
been through Versailles — and the Trianons, its 
adjuncts ; and therefore we see once again the value 
of foreign travel. Let me, however, give a few 
descriptive points. 

The chief characteristic of Versailles and its life 
was, perhaps, its formality : stiffness, even, is not 
too strong a term. The great garden front of the 
palace, with its columns and rows of windows ; the 
broad terrace flanked with a stone balustrade sup- 
porting great vases and statues at regular intervals ; 
the sweeping flights of steps which lead to the 
gardens spread symmetrically about the great basins 
with their elaborate fountains ; and beyond these the 
long, long avenues of trees, straight and serried, lead- 
ing to the lodge gates and so to the outer world. 
The smaller gardens, with their clipped yew hedges, 
backing statues, and miniature temples, were equally 
stiff and formal. Within the palace the same order, 
the same simplicity is to be noticed, magnificent 
indeed in detail, but almost bare in its spaces and 
absence of gimcrackery, cosy corners, golliwogs, 
china dogs, framed photographs, and all we are used 
to in English homes. The straight, rectangular 
dignity of the Mirror Hall, with its occasional gilt 
chairs and stools, where the King of Prussia was 
declared Emperor of Germany in 1870, is the 
embodiment of the French genius for definition and 
severe simplicity, combined with just proportions and 
fine finish in detail. The people who moved through 
these halls and grounds were as clear-cut and pre- 
cise as the scenes among which they lived. The 
fashions of the day — we may perhaps summarize them' 
as the style of Cinderella and the glass slipper — are 



n6 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

well known to us still ; for long after they ceased to 
be the costume of the great world they remained 
the costume of servants, and the Lord Mayor's coach 
and coachmen are to-day the direct descendants of 
the style of le Grand Monarque. 

Nor were their thoughts and speech, their art and 
literature any less regulated than their architecture, 
their gardens, or their fashions. The large, empty 
areas of their rooms and terraces were intended 
as the assembly-places of courtly crowds who were 
not afraid to walk and bow, and, above all, talk. 
In a company which amuses itself thus, pictures, 
music, entertainments play but a secondary part, 
though such as are offered to the guests must neces- 
sarily be of the same rigorous form and finish as 
everything else in this remarkable period. 

The rules of art were as tightly drawn as the rules 
of behaviour and Court etiquette. The poets and 
dramatists of the period were restricted in every, 
way. Each line had to be complete in itself ; rhymes 
had to follow in a rigid sequence ; no change of 
scene was permitted in a play, and the acts had to 
follow each other as nearly as possible without any 
lengthy break of time — like the three days, or three 
months, or three years to which we are accustomed. 
And lastly their vocabularies were restricted to a 
ridiculous extent : such a word as " dog " was for- 
bidden them, because it was a base word, a work- 
aday word. If, therefore, a poet wished to refer to 
a dog he had to call it " the respectable supporter of 
fidelity," or something equally roundabout and pom- 
pous. The breaking of these rules by Hugo in his 
play " Hernani " produced a free fight in the theatre 
in the days when political energy, denied a rightful 
outlet in government, gave rise to the Romantic 
movement — i.e. just after Napoleon and Waterloo. 

And so we could go on ; but I have said enough 
to convey the impression I aim at, an impression of 



FRANCE 117 

classic clearness, definiteness, almost coldness. And 
yet, in spite of its rigidity, perhaps even in a sense 
because of it, this age of Louis XIV is a very great 
age. It sees the rise of the classic French drama 
to its highest point. It is the age of Corneille, of 
Racine, of Moliere. Richelieu, who had done so much 
towards building up the power of the King, also 
aided literature by helping to found the Academy ; 
while Moliere's theatre, the Comedie Frangaise, 
became a State institution, and has remained so to 
the present day. And French drama still penetrates 
freely to other lands— especially to England. 

It was the clearness and definiteness of the French 
genius which gave French institutions of all sorts 
so great an advantage, so good a start, during this 
period. The writers, dramatists, artists, builders, 
tailors of the age of Louis XIV knew exactly the 
effect they aimed at producing, and thus frequently 
succeeded in their aim. And not only was their 
clearness of vision and expression an advantage to 
France in her internal development ; it gave her 
also a lead among other nations of Europe which 
she has never lost. France had a vision and a 
purpose : therefore she led in all things ; her clear 
voice compelled the obedience of her unformed 
neighbours. Milton had been Latin Secretary to 
Oliver Cromwell, or, as we should now call him, 
Foreign Secretary. In his day, therefore, the foreign 
correspondence of our country — and, indeed, of all 
countries — was carried on in the ancient universal 
language of the Roman Empire and Church. But 
very shortly after Milton's day Latin gave place to 
French as the language of diplomacy, as, indeed, 
we have already seen, and they say that to-day a 
French Ambassador may always be known by his 
ignorance of every language except his own, which is 
the only one he needs, as all Foreign Offices and 
ambassadors use his language : — for from the moment 



n8 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

when the Academy had overhauled the French 
language, and given it an authoritative grammar, 
spelling, and so forth, and thus rendered clearer 
still its natural clearness, no language in Europe 
could compare with it for general utility. 

The spread of French as the polite and diplomatic 
language of Europe was helped by the spread of 
French fashions and ideas all over the Continent. 
Indeed, one French success paved the way for 
another. And not only is French to-day the patois 
of Europe, which we all have to learn as early as 
possible, but every European capital has its Ver- 
sailles, modelled largely on the lines of the great 
French palace, near at hand. Our own Hampton 
Court has fountains by the designer of Versailles ; 
there is Herrenhausen outside Hanover, Nymphen- 
burg outside Munich, Schonbrunn outside Vienna, 
and, above all, Potsdam, that splendid series of 
palaces stretching mile after mile to the west of 
Berlin. All these bear stronger or fainter traces 
of French influence, but Potsdam is the most interest- 
ing of them all. 

We have already walked in imagination through 
the Sans-Souci palace and seen Frederick the Great's 
writing-table ; but I wish to mention another room 
in this palace, the room in which Voltaire, the 
great and bitter French philosopher, lived under 
Frederick's protection when driven for his opinions 
out of France. In this room one realizes the strength 
of French influence in the eighteenth century ; one 
remembers that Frederick, founder of Prussia though 
he was, talked and wrote and read French, and 
corresponded with French friends with apparently 
no thought for the native language he was neglect- 
ing. We see his manuscripts and his music and his 
library ; and we have to remind ourselves that we 
are not in the study of a French noble, but of the 
great Warrior King of the Prussians himself. 



FRANCE 119 

I have already in an earlier essay shown how 
strong French influence was upon German litera- 
ture, and in particular on the German drama. We 
have only to look through the furniture makers' 
and decorators' catalogues, the milliners' styles, the 
cooks' recipes, the potters' workrooms, the weavers' 
sheds to realize how great French influence was and 
is in every branch of art, fine and applied, not 
only in Germany, but throughout Europe. Louis 
Quinze, Louis Seize, Pompadour, Du Barry, Gobelins, 
Sevres, even the " Soles Colbert " of the menu card — 
all have a dominant place in the world of decoration, 
design, and good living. 

Nor have we even yet exhausted the influence of 
France at the height of her glory. Not only was 
she the arbiter of fashion and the dictator of litera- 
ture, she was also the leader in war. Versailles 
alone cost Louis XIV twenty million pounds, and 
Versailles was by no means his only palace. Well, 
for the interest on that sum, about half a million a 
year, he could keep our own King Charles II in his 
pocket, and get him to direct England's foreign policy 
on lines which suited France. He pushed his boun- 
daries to the Rhine, taking in Alsace-Lorraine, and 
pressed so hard on Holland that the Stadtholder, 
William of Orange, talked about dying in the last 
ditch (that is where the phrase comes from), and 
accepted the Crown of England really for the sake 
of turning England's forces, such as they were, 
against France on Holland's behalf. But not only 
to the east and north-east was Louis victorious ; he 
also established his influence over Spain, which he 
secured for his grandson, Philip V, in the teeth of 
the opposition of Austria and England, led by Marl- 
borough. The struggle for Spain was the famous 
War of the Spanish Succession, in which we scored 
the Flemish victories of Oudenarde, Ramillies, and 
Malplaquet, and the South German victory of Blen- 



120 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

heim — all against either the French or their allies the 
Bavarians. It was also for help rendered to Austria 
in this war, we should remember, that the Elector 
of Brandenburg was allowed by the Emperor to call 
himself King of Prussia. 

After this war, although, as a result of it, Louis' 
grandson sat on the Spanish throne, France was not 
the same country as she had been before it. The 
capture of Namur from Louis in 1695 by our own 
Dutch William was the first check that French arms 
had received for thirty years ; and henceforth the 
military glory of le Grand Monarqae began to 
dim. But the Power that begins to lose its hold 
on the supremacy it has once established cannot 
expect any intervals for recovery. Her rivals and 
victims are too watchful and resentful for that, and 
thus we find France plunged still farther into wars 
w r hich she was less and less economically fitted to 
bear. While, indeed, the French coffers — despite 
the w r ise efforts of Colbert — were being drained, the 
coffers of England, her chief rival, were being heaped 
up with the profits of the South Sea and Eastern 
trade, largely the result of the treaty which ended 
the last great war — the Treaty of Utrecht in 17 13 
(just a couple of centuries back, be it observed) ; 
and France had to plod wearily on and on through the 
greater part of the eighteenth century, fighting in 
Europe and doing her best to protect her Indian 
and American possessions against England ; all of 
which is, however, better left till we consider the 
story from England's point of view. 

The pressure of war soon began to tell upon 
France, and the changes which occurred in that 
fair land are grievous to record. The nobles, who 
had been ousted from the Government by Richelieu, 
were living a life entirely separated from that of their 
tenants, the peasants. Still more remote from reality 
was the great society which continued to fill the 



FRANCE 121 

palace and domain at Versailles — a crowd of ex- 
quisites who still managed to amuse themselves in 
the midst of defeat and poverty as light-heartedly 
as they had done in the days when Louis XIV's 
generals were sending in trophies from all the battle- 
fields of Europe. In the grounds of Versailles there 
were still the Trianons : the Grand Trianon which 
Louis XIV himself had built, and beyond that 
the Petit Trianon, built for Louis XVI's lively 
Queen, Marie Antoinette, an Austrian by birth, 
and where she played at dairy-farming with her 
ladies. 

We all know Watteau's pictures, and those little 
Dresden figures of shepherds and shepherdesses in 
buckled shoes, lace ruffles, and pink bows on their 
crooks and round the necks of their frisky lambs. 
Well, that represented the Court's conception of work 
on the land. If we compare one of these dainty 
figures with the stern, sombre statues of Meunier or 
the solemn paintings of Millet, we learn at once how 
far the Court was removed from the realities of 
the peasants' lot. Once a courtier is said to have 
told the Queen that the people had no bread. The 
Queen was surprised for a moment, but only for a 
moment. " But can't they eat cake? " she is re- 
ported to have asked. Some years later a more 
truculent aristocrat said, " Then let them eat grass ! " 
So, when his head was struck off in the Revolution 
and hoisted on a pike, its mouth was filled with 
grass before it went round the streets of Paris. 

Revolution ! I have uttered the word perhaps 
before its time, for it was not yet, although its shadow 
was already darkening. Already the thinkers and 
writers of France were growing uneasy. The con- 
ventions of an aristocratic age, framed simply to 
please an aristocratic Court, were already growing 
hollow and unreal, and the bravest and boldest of 
writers were already saying things which brought 



122 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

down on their heads the wrath of the Court and drove 
them into exile. 

We have already seen Voltaire made welcome at 
Potsdam by Frederick the Great, although the two 
soon quarrelled, and Voltaire went to England, where 
he became quite an Anglomaniac, and actually dis- 
covered Shakespeare ! Then, rather later, there was 
Rousseau, who had somehow arrived at the idea 
that all men, and not only the dandies of Versailles 
and their women-folk, had rights. Again, there was 
the vigorous Diderot, who with his friends undertook 
the gigantic business of setting forth all existing 
knowledge in an Encyclopaedia, so that all the world, 
and not only a select mutual admiration society, 
might drink deep of the Pierian Spring, as our own 
poet Pope was calling the well of knowledge at 
about the same time. All these men had to meet 
persecution, and a group of prisoners in the Bastille 
often formed the finest literary and philosophic salon 
in Europe during these years of stress in France. 

Thus the age, though decaying in one way, was 
germinating in another, just as the autumn sows the 
seeds of the ensuing spring. The ideas of this age, 
the age of Louis XV and of Louis XVI, are indeed 
seedpods of immense potency, such potency that 
they have not yet ceased to germinate, nor ever will. 
When Burns sang, " A man's a man for a' that," he 
was simply setting Rousseau to a tune ; and as we 
go farther we shall see that the triumphs of this new 
period of French influence are greater by far than 
the triumphs of the period which rejected its most 
characteristic ideas, the age of Louis XIV ; for the 
classic period of le Grand Monarque was great by 
reason of its form ; it was the era of style ; whereas 
the age of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists 
was the age of ideas — form-shattering and explosive, 
liberating, fructifying, even when most violent and 
destructive, like lightning in the soil. 



FRANCE 123 

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the 
thinkers of this period was their firm, I had almost 
said their touching, belief in the efficacy of Reason. 
History, tradition, things as they were, with their 
roots in the past, were hopelessly bad ; all one could 
work for was to — 

Shatter it to bits, 
And mould it nearer to the heart's desire, 

and to discover the heart's desire by the light of 
Pure Reason — a light which appealed to the French, 
with their love of the clear-cut, definite, logical, and 
formal. 

I can give here only one instance of the working 
out of this application of Pure Reason by the philo- 
sophers of eighteenth-century France — but it is a 
very important one. 

Rousseau started his train of thought on the as- 
sumption that, just as a man has arms and legs, so 
has he certain inherent and inalienable rights : of 
existence, of liberty, and so forth. In my Introduction 
I pointed out that the war has reminded us what our 
rights really are — simply such privileges and free- 
doms as the State can afford to leave with us under 
the circumstances of the moment : that no man has 
rights against the State, but must be content with his 
State allowance of liberty. Well, Rousseau, pur- 
suing his imaginary and quite unhistorical — but never- 
theless very useful — conception of man and his rights 
into its deeper recesses, arrived at the conclusion 
that the State was a sort of club or co-operative 
society made up by men joining together for their 
mutual benefit : protection, for example. To gain 
this benefit the individual gave up some portion of 
his inherent liberty, just as we give up some portion 
of our cash when we join a cricket or football club. 
By joining the State, as by joining a club of any 



i2 4 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

sort, we allow ourselves to be ordered about, we 
lose liberty to a certain extent ; but we keep all 
we have not given up, just as we still have our 
evenings to ourselves even if on Saturday afternoons 
we are put in goal when we know we are born centre- 
forwards. So having most of our liberty left us, 
the little drawbacks of our associated relationships 
do not worry us much, and we get along quite 
comfortably and everybody is satisfied. 

But suppose that our club takes our subscription 
and never gives us a game, or puts us just once or 
twice into the second team merely to keep us quiet, 
what do we do then? Why, we resign, and not only 
save the amount of our subscription, but also regain 
our full freedom. Instead of freezing in goal, we 
are again at liberty to freeze in the company of twenty 
thousand enthusiasts at a League match on Saturday 
afternoon. We have resumed our liberty. 

We can, and do, withdraw from a club which is not 
treating us as we think we should be treated. Now, 
can we withdraw from the State in a similar way, 
and can a State which is working badly call, as it 
were, a meeting, like a club meeting, discharge the 
committee, dismiss the secretary, distrain on the 
treasurer, and make a fresh start? Rousseau thought 
all that was possible, since it was a reasonable and 
logical deduction from his premisses that man has 
this inalienable right or quality called liberty which 
he can pool or loan or reassume as it suits his pur- 
pose ; and that since Reason is supreme and all- 
compelling, the conclusions to which Reason leads us 
are not only valid but practicable. 

Rousseau was thus a thinker who placed the in- 
dividual first, and accorded the State only such 
functions and such powers as the individual allowed 
it to exercise ; that is to say, he was an Individualist. 
He also regarded the State as a society or organiza- 
tion resting on the consent or voluntary submission 



FRANCE 125 

of all its members ; he could not conceive of the 
State as possessing any powers of compulsion that 
were not, as it were, in the Articles of Association, 
in the rules which had been drawn up by the members 
and which new members voluntarily accepted. Since 
he refused to acknowledge the State's power of com- 
pulsion, since he regarded the State as resting entirely 
on consent and co-operation, he was essentially, 
though perhaps not formally, an Anarchist — that is, 
one who disbelieves in the use of compulsion in the 
matter of government, one who thinks that voluntary 
combination, such as one finds in a co-operative 
society, a dissenting chapel, a club of any sort (all 
essentially anarchic in their fundamental conception), 
will produce all the government and regulation that 
human society needs. 

In any corporate body, to take the next step, the 
most basic thing is the meeting of members or share- 
holders who have the ultimate power of deciding the 
destinies of the concern. Similarly the real basis 
of the State is the meeting of its members — in other 
words, the machinery — votes, elections, parliaments, 
assemblies, or whatsoever they may happen to be 
called — by which the individual expresses his views 
on matters of State. 

Thus to Rousseau, with his enthusiasm for in- 
dividual liberty (of which in his own affairs he availed 
himself to the full, by the way), the State became a 
ballot-box restricted to the smallest possible range 
of common interests and activities. The province 
of the State must be restricted in order that in- 
dividual liberty may be as great as possible, and the 
vote — as widespread as possible — is the means whereby 
the State is directed (in its own small sphere) in 
accordance with the wishes of the members. 

Thus Rousseau appears as the father of various 
other schools of thought besides the Individualists and 
Anarchists. His theories underlie the policy of that 



126 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

school of statesmen (if such they can be called) who 
in the nineteenth century wrought such damage in 
England — damage which we, with our education com- 
mittees, doctors, nurses, clinics, free meals, and so 
on, are still vainly trying to combat — the school of 
laissez-faire, the Manchester School, the school of 
" anarchy plus the policeman " as the ideal of the 
State, the school that believed that what benefited 
the individual benefited also the community, the 
school of individualism and the Tom-Tiddler's- 
Ground view of England that I have already dwelt 
upon. 

Then, again, Rousseau's simple faith in the ballot- 
box makes him the father of those political philo- 
sophers who regard the putting right of our electoral 
machinery as the one and only vital reform, since, the 
voting machine once made infallible, all other reforms 
will evolve of themselves by the counting of noses — or 
crosses. And thus Rousseau may claim among his 
spiritual descendants the Jacobins, the Chartists, with 
their parliamentary star of the five — or six — points 
:(my great-grandfather was a special constable at the 
" Horns,' ' Kennington, when Wellington had to deal 
with the Chartists' demonstration), the Radicals, and 
last, though not least, the Suffragettes, for do not 
they also believe that, the vote once won, the millen- 
nium will spring like a Jack-out-of-the-ballot-box? 

I have said that Rousseau's theories were important, 
and that is why I have tried to make them clear. 
They are important when we remember who can 
be numbered among his descendants, even though his 
theories were based on false and fanciful descriptions 
of human origins, and although in some of their 
applications they have come perilously near to one 
good custom corrupting the world. Further, we are 
faced with this difficulty : a faulty basis has given rise 
to a most useful theory — the theory, nay more, the 
burning conviction that " a man's a man for a' 



FRANCE 127 

that/' and that his claim to be treated as such is 
inalienable. Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in " What's 
Wrong with the World? " shows himself in this respect 
a real follower of Rousseau. He takes the case of 
a slum girl whose hair is beautiful but unclean. The 
authorities say it must therefore be cut off. Not 
so, says Mr. Chesterton. The glory of a woman 
is her hair. Therefore, so far from her crowning 
glory being shorn away, conditions of life, of clean- 
liness, of housing, of the mother's leisure, must be 
so altered that the girl's hair may be kept clean and 
she may wear an untarnished aureole around her 
head. With that girl's red-gold hair, indeed, he 
undertakes to set fire to the thing which calls itself 
our twentieth-century commercial civilization. As a 
matter of historical fact, however, it has always been 
the other way. The State has always forced the indi- 
vidual into the path it wills. There have been no con- 
tracts. The State exists before the individual ; and no 
baby has ever been known to address with its first 
breath its parents as representative of the State to the 
effect that it is prepared to love, honour, and obey them 
in their public capacity in return for such board, lodg- 
ing, and washing as its frail condition demands. Human 
beings are gregarious, like sheep, oxen, and wolves ; 
they live in crowds, and out of these crowds of 
human creatures the State somehow has emerged. 
Perhaps the nearest approach to a contract is the 
christening of a child and the promises made in his 
name by his godparents ; but that does not take 
us very far, nowadays at any rate. 

Yet, for the adjusting of the balance, for the 
maintenance of the essential humanity of man which 
is ever being threatened by the Juggernaut wheels 
of the State, it is just as well that the individual shall 
be encouraged to kick, even against the pricks ; it at 
least develops his muscles. And so long as he is so 
encouraged it is not of vital importance whether 



128 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

the teaching which encourages him is sound his- 
torically or only one of those Vital Lies which Ibsen 
speaks of now and again. The Pragmatist judges 
of theories by their fruits, not by their roots, and 
thus he approves the theory of Rousseau. We see 
now quite clearly why Rousseau's themes were so 
important : they were inspired by an ideal, even 
though the fact foundations he based them on were 
more than questionable. 

The curious thing about the writings of these 
philosophers is that they found a large and appre- 
ciative circle among the noblesse, whose severance 
from the mass of the people was a chief cause of 
the trouble that was already brewing. The clearness 
of thought and ease of expression of the philosophic 
writers won the praise of the great little world of 
Versailles, and the discussion of political theories 
became quite a fashionable pastime among the cour- 
tiers, who never dreamt that one day these same 
theories would be put into practice with crude 
ferocity on their own delicate necks. The French 
noblesse of the eighteenth century were as blind to 
the real significance of the philosophic literature they 
dabbled in as were the twentieth-century English 
reading public before the war to the real significance 
of the writings of the Superman, Master-morality, war- 
worshipping school of present-day German writers. 

But I do not wish to suggest that Rousseau's 
theories were the real cause of the Revolution. 
Revolutions are not produced by epigrams or philo- 
sophic treatises : they are the outcome of gross and 
palpable ills of the body politic, and the chief cause 
of the French Revolution was the bankruptcy of 
France which resulted from the dragging wars of the 
previous half-century. 

The last of these had been the help given by 
France to the American colonies of England in their 
revolt from the Mother Country, in a sense a war of 



FRANCE 129 

revenge for the defeats of the Seven Years War which 
lost France Canada and India. But as it turned out, 
revenge of this sort proved a veritable boomerang, 
for it was largely the return of the French troops 
from this war which started the French Revolution. 
In the Louvre in Paris, standing in the gardens be- 
tween its two great wings, may be seen a statue of 
Lafayette, Carlyle's " Hero of two Worlds," given 
by the American Republic 1 to the French Republic 
as a recognition of the help which France had always 
given America, while outside New York stands the 
great statue of Liberty given by France to the 
United States. Now Lafayette was not only a French 
general helping the Americans to rebel, he was also 
a leader of the early and moderate revolutionary 
party in France, the Girondins, and the ideas of 
liberty which his French soldiers had brought back 
from their contact with the liberty-loving colonists 
of the New England States greatly helped the spread 
of the revolutionary movement in France. Thus 
the Revolution started, but its course can be read 
in Carlyle's graphic volumes. 

All we need concern ourselves with was the effect 
which the great upheaval produced on Europe. 

Now the chief characteristic of a Revolution is 
its destructiveness, and the French Revolution was 
destructive beyond all others, not only by reason of 
its long-pent-up energy, but also because the ideas of 
the time favoured destructiveness as a preliminary to 
reconstruction. Thus we see going on in France a 
breaking up of institutions which was bound to affect 
most profoundly the surrounding States. The throne 
and the nobility perished, as everybody knows ; can 
we not gather as much from " The Only Way " and 
11 The Scarlet Pimpernel," our great popular authori- 
ties on the period? But perhaps the thoroughness of 
the destruction and its logicality are not so widely 
realized. Not only were the women knitters in the 

9 



130 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

law-courts voting nobles and aristocrats to the 
guillotine, but the active -minded Revolutionists were 
prepared also to remodel every institution of political 
or public significance. 

The old Provinces which had kept France divided 
for so long were cut up into Departments as we now 
see them on the map, and named, most reasonably, 
for the most part according to the rivers which flow 
through them ; the ancient, complicated, and absurd 
system of weights and measures was scrapped, and 
a brand-new system was founded on the perfectly 
reasonable metre, which the scientific men of the 
period made as nearly one ten-millionth of the dis- 
tance between the Pole and the Equator as they 
could. The Revolutionists also objected to the 
antiquated and ridiculous system of days, months, and 
years they found in the calendar, the days and the 
months named for the most part after heathen deities 
and in some cases so wrongly named as to be most 
misleading. Why, for instance, should the ninth, 
tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months have names which 
in themselves mean that the months are the seventh 
(Septem-ber), eighth (Octo-ber), ninth (Novem-ber), 
and tenth (Decem-ber), merely because Julius Csesar 
chose to fit in a month of his own (July), and his 
successor, Augustus, not to be outdone, added August 
in the spirit (reversed) of " Tommy, make room for 
your uncle"? Those logical-minded believers in the 
supremacy of Reason, the French Revolutionists, 
could not stand such wanton absurdity, so they 
tore up their calendar and renamed the months 
according to their natural characteristics : Brumiere, 
the foggy month ; Fructidor, the fruitful month ; 
Thermidor, the hot month, and so on. 

Then as to the year. Why should they begin to 
count from the birth of Christ — a purely guesswork 
date for one thing, and for another (and more im- 
portant) a recognition of the supremacy of the 



FRANCE 131 

Church : a supremacy which the Revolutionists, whose 
memories of the higher clergy, if not of the lower, 
were very bitter, totally denied. So they scrapped 
Anno Domini^ and with it the creed of Christ, andi 
they put in the place of a.d. Year One (or 
Two, as the case might be) of the Republic and 
in the place of Christianity the Goddess of Reason, 
whose statue they erected in the Champ de Mars 
and honoured by breaking up before it the plaster- 
cast images of all the other gods they thought were 
worthy to be put up, like so many old Aunt Sallys, 
for the purpose of being knocked down again. 

Now all this was reason run mad ; we might, 
indeed, say that the fury of the French Revolution 
was a riot of reason ; or rather, that the French 
Revolutionists, acting in reality on their deep but 
inarticulate emotions, on their anger, their despair, 
their hope for a brighter future, thought they were 
simply carrying out the dictates of their supreme 
reason. For we all know that reason is not supreme. 
We smile to-day when we hear a French mother tell 
her toddling child to " be reasonable,' ' for we know 
that its reason is not developed ; nor does the de- 
velopment of reason come inevitably with advancing 
years ; while we are quite safe in saying that at 
no period of even the most reasonable and intel- 
lectual man's career is reason the supreme and 
unchallenged guide of his life. It is and can be 
never more than the rein and the bit ; but emotion, 
imagination, enthusiasm, prejudice even, are only too 
ready to take the bit between their teeth and bolt. 
This is how mankind is made ; and the French are 
the most human of mankind, in spite of their belief 
in Reason. Nevertheless this belief undoubtedly 
strengthened them in the task of making a clean 
sweep of existing institutions : it was to them another 
Vital Lie ; they felt they were quite right to apply 
the criticism of the hammer to everything they found, 



i 3 2 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and to destroy whatever seemed to them unreason- 
able. We in England, on the other hand, are so 
deficient in boldness that alone among the people 
of Western Europe we cling to our antique weights 
and measures, our preposterous spelling, and our 
dear old unwieldy shire of Yorks — with its three 
Ridings, pretending that which is not. 

However much the Revolution may have accom- 
plished in the way of change, it had not, however, 
altered the real nature of the French. No revolu- 
tion could do that ; and before long the chaos which 
worked itself through the successive stages of the 
Reign of Terror was resolved into a Government 
of the sort under which France has always been 
greatest — a military autocracy (for France, like 
Germany, believes in war ; but I think with this 
difference : that the French are born fighters, 
whereas the Germans buy their fighting power only, 
at a great price). 

At any rate, France emerges from the Revolu- 
tion as a first-class fighting State once more. Even 
in her earliest days revolutionary France had shown 
herself a fighter, and the joyous frenzy of the Valmy 
cannonade had blown the serried ranks of Prussia 
to pieces as we have already seen. But soon 
Dumouriez and his sans-culottes were to be super- 
seded by a young Corsican who knew how to use; 
artillery even better than they did, and from that 
day to this artillery has been the Frenchman's chief 
weapon. Napoleon harnessed the French Revolu- 
tion : he found it like a vast rush of steam hissing 
its way through a rent it had torn in the side of 
its enclosing boiler ; he managed by applying the 
right machinery for the purpose to turn all this 
waste energy to account. The enthusiasm of the 
Revolution, in short, was the driving force behind 
Napoleon Fs armies. Napoleon could not afford 
tQ play the high and mighty King of kings role 



FRANCE 133 

even at the height of his glory, ; and many a tale, 
from the story of his washerwoman " the Duchess 
of Dantzic " onwards, turns on the contrast between 
Napoleon the adventurer and Napoleon the Lord 
of Europe. We have therefore to regard Napoleon 
as the rider on the whirlwind of the Revolution, and 
under his leadership French armies were in a very 
real sense a liberating force in Europe. " I war/' 
Napoleon said in effect, " against Governments, not 
against peoples V ; and as a matter of fact the French 
armies were usually welcomed by the inhabitants 
of the districts they invaded. Thus Napoleon, though 
a military absolutist, was also at the same time 
ruler of a Liberal State and representative at the 
head of his Army of Liberal principles. His violence 
was the beneficent violence of the plough : not 
that Napoleon was intentionally a benefactor, but 
because his own self-aggrandizement happened to 
coincide with the triumphs of revolutionary prin- 
ciples enforced by French arms. He and his people 
were optimists, fighting — for their own glory, yes, 
but through that for a brighter era ahead of them 
(whereas Germany, bemused as she is by the idea 
of evolution through brutality, is fighting the 
desperate cause of Pessimism and doing her best 
to reverse the tide of human development and send 
it flowing back into the Dark Ages of Attila and 
his Huns — who passed away without leaving anything 
but a wake of destruction). 

If we need evidence of Napoleon's liberalizing 
ideas, we have simply to turn to his reconstitution 
of Poland : Nicholas II is simply repeating 
Napoleon's work at the interval of a century ; 
and if Napoleon had only been able to halt on 
the Russian frontiers of Poland and refuse that fatal 
invasion of Russia, how different would the fate of 
Europe have been ! The impulse of the French 
Revolution was felt beyond the area of even 



134 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Napoleon's campaigns ; and the rising of the 
subject States of the Balkans against their Turkish 
masters early in the nineteenth century is due to 
it. We shall have, however, to consider this move- 
ment in our next essay. 

Nor must we think of Napoleon as liberal on 
his campaigns only. Mr. J. E. C. Bodley has 
written a very big book on France to show how 
largely all that is stable and solid in the France 
of to-day is the work of Napoleon. He and not 
the Revolutionists remoulded France. He tactfully 
shelved the eccentricities which represented the 
heart's desire of the worshippers of Reason : Brumiere 
and the rest — it is not so easy to remould effectively 
as to destroy effectively ; and with the re- estab- 
lishment of Anno Domini he re-established also 
relations with the Church and drew up a Concordat 
which remained effective for a century — until a few 
years ago, indeed, when the Associations Law broke 
the agreement and turned the monks out of France. 
The Civil Code, the Code Napoleon, is the body 
of law administered in the French courts to-day. 
Nor did he disdain to look after the material con- 
cerns of his Empire. The great French roads owe 
much to him ; and he established the beet-sugar 
industry. 

But for all his glory and real greatness he was 
overthrown. Moscow, Leipsic, Waterloo mark his 
downfall, and France was forced to take back the 
long-exiled Bourbons. A Holy Alliance tried to 
stamp out in Europe the seeds of liberty that France 
had sown ; and it looked as though the great volcanic 
upheaval of the Revolution and the glittering glories 
of the Empire had been in vain. But the forces 
of beneficent destruction were only slumbering 
beneath their crater, Paris ; and in 1848 the second 
French Revolution awoke a sympathetic thrill 
throughout Europe : even Prussia felt it, as we 



FRANCE 135 

have seen, and remote Schleswig-Holstein. But 
this second outburst, interesting though it is in so 
many ways — we might do worse than look into the 
working of the Ateliers Publiques of the period 
(some people say they were planned to fail from 
the beginning) — must not detain us. Though a great 
deal of the theorizing which has made its appear- 
ance of late years in the ranks of Labour can be 
traced to the leaders of this Revolution, and though 
the leaders did not stop at theory but ventured to 
put some at least of their theories to the test of 
practice, yet we must leave this second and less 
well-known French Revolution with this : that not 
only had France proved herself yet once again the 
fountain-head of ideas and the stimulator of Liberal 
movements throughout Europe, but she had again 
fallen under the spell of a military adventurer. 
Louis Napoleon repeats almost in detail the steps 
by which his much greater uncle, Napoleon I, gained 
the Imperial Throne. And thus we arrive at the 
second Empire — a far less wholesome and glorious 
regime than that of Napoleon I. But it shared 
with the first Empire the essential characteristic of 
military adventure. No Buonaparte could hope to 
retain his hold on the imagination of France, and 
therefore on her loyalty, without victories. So 
Napoleon III set out on his wars. (Napoleon II 
never reigned. He was the son of Napoleon I and 
Marie Louise and faded away in the lifeless Court 
of Vienna.) But Napoleon III was no Heaven- 
sent leader of armies. It is true he defeated Austria, 
but that was no great achievement : she is the most 
unlucky State in Europe as far as war is con- 
cerned, and she is not too lucky in other ways. 
It is true again that by defeating Austria and driving 
her out of Italy he helped indirectly — as we have 
already seen — in the founding of a United Italy 
under Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia and 



136 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

grandfather of the present King of Italy. It is 
true also that he helped England against Russia 
in the Crimea and that he interfered in the affairs 
of Mexico. More important perhaps because more 
successful was the canal building of French engineers 
at this period — the accomplished Suez Canal, which 
his uncle Napoleon I had first considered in 1798, 
and the projected Panama Canal. But none of these 
minor and uninspiring successes compares for a 
moment with even the smallest of the great 
Napoleonic campaigns ; and the disasters of 1870 
— due as they were to the carelessness and slack- 
ness of the Imperial Government, to its over- 
confidence in itself and ignorance of Prussian 
preparedness — entirely shattered the military prestige, 
such as it was, of Napoleon the Little, broke up 
his Empire, drove him and his wife Eugenie as exiles 
to England, and plunged France into the horrors 
of the Commune of 187 1. As Mr. G. K. Chester- 
ton points out in his "Victorian Literature,' ' 1870 
was the death of Liberalism. " Liberalism had been 
barricaded by Bismarck with blood and iron and 
by Darwin with blood and bone," he says. Bismarck 
founded the German Empire, Darwin supplied the 
Survival of the Fittest idea which, distorted and 
misapplied, has inspired Bismarck's Empire from its 
foundation onwards. 

But the third Revolution of the Commune did not 
give rise to a third military dictatorship, for the 
simple reason that France had only just rid herself 
— with the help of Germany — of the ineffective 
militarism of Napoleon III. Instead, a Republic, 
the third Republic, was founded : not because it 
moved any single Frenchman to enthusiasm, but 
simply because it was that form of government which 
divided Frenchmen least. Indeed, many of those 
who had done most to bring the Republic about fully 
expected it to collapse very quickly ; and the first 



FRANCE 137 

President, Marshal MacMahon, regarded himself as 
practically nothing more than a warming-pan for 
the Bourbons. But, as usual, the Bourbons had 
learned nothing and their chance passed — so com- 
pletely, indeed, that to-day they cannot even enlist 
as privates in the French Army. The Buonapartes 
were of course impossible : and so the Republic 
managed to survive. Yet the ever-recurring desire 
of France for a military leader has been an ever- 
present source of danger to the Republic. Even such 
a circus-Napoleon as General Boulanger on his white 
horse seemed at one time as though he might come 
within measurable distance of a coup d'etat and its 
resultant autocracy : only he shot himself on a lady's 
grave and the Republic breathed again. But once 
more it was threatened. The Dreyfus case had 
raised the dangerous problem of the Army against 
the Nation, and at the funeral of President Felix 
Faure — of whom more anon — Paul Deroulede, a great 
Anti-Dreyfus leader and an ardent supporter of the 
Army, actually stepped out from the crowds lining 
the streets, seized the bridle of the horse on which 
the Military Governor of Paris — I think it was — sat, 
and tried to turn him towards the Presidential House. 
' A l'Elysee ! " he said. Had the Governor allowed 
himself to be led thus out of his course, a coup d'etat 
might have resulted, since Paris was full of soldiers 
and the Anti-Dreyfusards had a large following 
among the Parisians. 

Thus it becomes clear that France dearly loves 
a soldier — whereas Germany goose-steps to the word 
of command — and her martial instincts, thwarted and 
misdirected, play havoc with her internal peace. But 
once these same instincts find their true sphere, 
France is herself again. Her troublesome period 
was her period of isolation and soreness : of 
revenge -dreaming and recovery-planning. When, 
however, she was able to hold her head up again 



138 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

among the Powers of Europe and feel that the 
future held something for her after all, many of her 
domestic troubles disappeared. 

The Russian Alliance was the turn of the tide in 
the affairs of France. When De Witte began his 
work of developing Russian resources — railways, 
manufactures, mines, and so forth — he looked round 
for the capital his projects demanded : and he found 
that the readiest lenders were the French peasants. 
And for this reason : the French peasant is a very 
thrifty person, the hardest worker perhaps in Europe. 
Paris, indeed, gives one quite a wrong idea of France, 
which in its rural districts at least is a solemn and 
serious, almost a dour, land. The French farmer tills 
his own fields and his wife keeps his accounts. The 
man does the handwork, the woman the headwork : 
with the result that there are always funds waiting 
for investment. Now the one thing which that 
admirable business woman the farmer's wife wants 
in an investment is not high interest but security : 
so she is always on the look-out for gilt-edged Stock, 
of which the most heavily gilt is of course Govern- 
ment Loans. Thus it was that the gold of French 
peasants helped to build the railways and factories 
of Russia and to sink her mines. Thus it was that 
the two States, one on either side of Germany (who 
after Bismarck's fall had cancelled Bismarck's wise 
treaty with Russia), were drawn together by com- 
munity of interest. I well remember the thrill which 
went through Europe, and especially France, when 
the Czar proposed the health of the Allied Nations 
at a lunch he gave on, I think, his yacht the Standart 
in the Baltic to President Faure. It was as though 
France, neglected and forlorn, had received sud- 
denly and unexpectedly a splendid offer of marriage. 
One of the finest bridges which spans the Seine 
to-day is the Alexander III Bridge. Near by is 
the figure of Strasburg, so long seated amid her 



FRANCE 139 

mourning wreaths in the Place de la Concorde, but 
now once again sitting as clear-cut in the sunshine 
as any of her sister cities in the Place. 

The Alliance with Russia was followed by the 
Entente with England, the work of that u good 
European/' Edward VII, who was quite as much 
at home in Paris as he was in London. This Entente, 
which followed the troublesome incident of Fashoda, 
when the French tried to establish themselves on the 
Upper Nile, recognized that England should be left 
undisturbed and given a free hand in Egypt while 
France enjoyed a similar freedom in Morocco. But 
here we get back again to the ground we were 
traversing in our German studies, so there is no need 
to retread it now. 

I undertook in this essay to show what France 
had accomplished for civilization in her gloriously 
diversified career. I feel that the record of France 
even in my brief summary of it stands on its own 
feet : it needs no apologist. Nevertheless I should 
like to give a few more illustrations of that spirit 
which made France so great under Louis XIV, and 
which has continued to inform her national life ever 
since — the spirit of Art. 

Paris is the one capital in Western Europe where 
it is better to be an artist or a writer than a merely 
successful man of business. France has a belief 
in education which beats even that of Germany, 
if we may judge by the way in which the professors 
in the French Lycees are treated. They have only 
some seven or eight hours' teaching a week, and 
they retire on a two-thirds pension at fifty-five or 
sixty with a remainder to their widows. They 
have no disciplinary or administrative duties : 
these are undertaken by their subordinates, the 
repetiteurs. But they are expected to engage 
in original work in their own subject, as only 



140 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

in this way, the Government argue, can the 
teacher be kept really efficient for his vitally im- 
portant work. The University staffs are chosen from 
the best of the school professors ; and recently when 
the question of increasing the teaching hours in the 
Lycees was raised, it was decided that there would 
be no real economy in doing so. When, some two 
or three years ago, I arranged to work weekly for 
the same number of teaching hours as a French 
Lycee professor, I was obliged at the same time to 
drop more than half my salary, as my Education 
Committee said I was working only part time. When, 
again, in a former situation I wished to undertake 
original work, I was told that I must do it in my 
holidays, as it would interfere with my work in 
school if I attempted it in addition to my teach- 
ing. Self-improvement is thus for English teachers 
a holiday task to be undertaken in summer schools. 
We may say, then, that France is as disciplined 
in the things of the mind as is Germany, yet with 
this difference : that whereas German training brings 
up the German to reverence and appreciate what 
his teachers hold to be great, the French training 
furnishes its people with a still keener edge to their 
naturally strong individuality, a stilly finer critical 
sense than that with which Nature has gifted them, 
because it is a critical sense sharpened, not blunted, 
on masterpieces. Whereas German Imperialism can 
heap up a monstrous box of bricks and call it a 
Liberation monument, the opinion of the man in the 
street is a constant check on the French architect 
and sculptor. 

When Napoleon wanted to distract his Parisians' 
thoughts from the bad news that was dribbling 
through from Moscow, he ordered the dome of the 
Invalides to be gilt, knowing how such an innova- 
tion would fill the mind of the Parisians. If such a 
piece of work were undertaken in a provincial town 



FRANCE 141 

in England, public interest would be centred on the 
one question, Who has the contract? In London 
probably nobody would know anything at all about it 
till the work was done past recall. In England 
we may be mildly critical of the cameo-likfe beauties 
of a new English postage stamp ; but we care 
nothing for the Shakespeare National Memorial 
Scheme, which ought to mature in 191 6, but which 
is by this time, I suppose, hopelessly forgotten. If 
we had a Napoleon over us at the present moment, 
he would at once begin the National Theatre out 
of public funds, and on a splendid scale. If there 
were no national funds, he would not hesitate to use 
the Prince of Wales' Fund for the purpose. But 
we are not under Napoleon, and perhaps, after all,, 
we are not ready for a National Theatre, since 
" It's a long way to Tipperary " in the battlefield 
of Art as in the battlefield of Arms. 

Napoleon's interest in the State theatres of France 
was certainly keen. Even during his short stay in 
Moscow before it took fire he busied himself with 
revising the constitution of Moliere's theatre, the 
Comedie Frangaise. We can imagine the comment 
of the British taxpayer if he had heard that Lord 
Roberts or Lord Kitchener had given time to the 
police regulations of, let us say, the Johannesburg 
' Empire " — if there is such a place — during the Boer 
War. " Why, sir," I can hear him saying, " why is 
he wasting his time and our money over such non- 
sense? Let him give his attention to the affairs 
of another Empire — the British Empire ! " and his 
wife would look up at him admiringly through her 
spectacles. 

Napoleon had a catholic taste in Art. Not only 
was he interested in the drama, and numbered 
Talma, the great actor of the period, among his 
friends, but he followed Marlborough's example, and 
brought home with him from his campaigns many 



142 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

of the finest works of art of the lands he had sub- 
dued — the bronze horses from the portico of St. 
Mark's, Venice, for instance. Paris was indeed a 
treasure-house in the days of the First Empire ; but 
of course all these works had to be restored in 
1815. 

The Republican and Napoleonic eras are not, 
however, merely eras of destruction and accumula- 
tion. They originated and left behind them their 
own distinctive styles, and we have to add to those 
we mentioned as belonging to Louis XIV those also 
of the Directoire and Empire ; while still, of course, 
Paris is the headquarters of the painters, the 
sculptors, and the designers. 

But perhaps it is not the French love of art 
which appeals most to Englishmen. I think they 
have been more struck by the dash and daring with 
which the French have put their theories to the test 
of actual application, not only in the world of politics 
but in the world of mechanics also. It was a 
Frenchman, Montgolfier, who first risked going up 
in a balloon, and that a fire balloon, the idea of which 
he had obtained from Cavendish's work. Most of 
the machines the perfection of which comes with 
the experience gained in the dangerous use of their 
earliest forms — the motor, the motor-cycle, the sub- 
marine, the aeroplane, and so forth — are of French 
origin. Prudent and practical England looks on 
while quixotic Frenchmen dash themselves to pieces 
in the practical application of theoretic formulae, and 
then, when most of the risk has been taken, adopt 
and develop the machine. I well remember the 
comment of a provincial newspaper — I will not name 
it as I am none too sure of our delightful English 
law of libel — when the first aviator looped the loop — 
a Frenchman, of course. It was all very well for a 
Frenchman, it said, to do the trick, but Englishmen 
had better be careful. However, the trick once done, 



FRANCE 143 

our men soon took it up, and probably at the present 
moment an Englishman holds the record for the 
number of loops ; nevertheless, the glory and risk, 
first of the idea itself, then of its carrying out, with 
all their spiritual value, are the inalienable pos- 
session of the French, not of their imitators, English 
and other. Even in the world of mere physical 
prowess the French have given us some fairly 
startling results. I was never so delighted as when 
Carpentier — now an airman — knocked out Wells in 
I forget how few rounds. We thought, at least, 
that we could box, whereas the Frenchman only 
kicked. A French Rugby team at play is also a 
sight worth seeing, whatever lack of finish they may 
show. 

So, then, what shall we say in conclusion? This 
merely : That if we fought the relatively liberal, 
humane, and generous Imperialism of Napoleon — 
an optimistic Imperialism which shot like lava from 
the depths of the French Revolution and, disinte- 
grating, formed most fertile soil — till we had de- 
stroyed it, how much more are we prepared to fight 
the leaden, lowering, cynical, and brutal Imperialism 
of the Germans, with its materialistic pessimism and 
its step backward in the scale of civilization? The 
spirit of France is the very antithesis of that of 
Germany ; the war between them is more than a 
war of conflicting armies and interests : it is a war 
of conflicting ideals of life, between Rousseau's 
individualism and Treitschke's Imperialism : it is a 
struggle between opposite national temperaments. 
Germany will doubtless continue her steady plod 
towards her ideals by one road or another, whichever 
roads may be closed to her by the present war ; but if 
ever her road takes her across the path of the French 
in any sphere, the age-long struggle is sure to be 
renewed. Germany will ever elaborate her machinery 
while all the time ignoring the human factor, which, 



i 4 4 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

like our accidental impunity in a chemical synthesis, 
entirely alters the expected result ; France will con- 
tinue that incomparable regime of gaiety and exact- 
ness which is the very salt of a healthy humanity. 
And what can we learn from France? She holds' 
out to us the same lesson as Germany does — the 
lesson of high seriousness and strenuous honesty of 
thought, of the need for a clear vision and a definite 
ideal, and of continuous endeavour along a well- 
considered line of advance. There was a time, as 
we shall see presently, when England also felt her- 
self equal to such efforts ; but of late we have grown 
too diffusive, too slack and undisciplined, too frivo- 
lous, in fact, though the word sounds strange when 
applied to such a solemn people, to be able to 
face such exacting conceptions of public duty with 
cheerfulness. We have tasted of the pleasures of 
drift and of a short-sighted enjoyment of the present ; 
and concentrated effort of any kind, especially con- 
centrated thinking, is repugnant, and may soon be 
impossible, to us. This, then, is the tonic of French 
example. Just as a couple of French soldiers once 
called Goethe from his bed, so France to-day calls, 
not Germany — Germany is fully awake — but England, 
whose bed is always so warm and soft, so cosy and 
comfortable, to be up and doing, and, above all, 
thinking : hard. 



THIRD ESSAY 

THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 

In our manoeuvring round the fixed point of the 
war we have dealt with the same set of facts from the 
points of view of the two most continuously and 
temperamentally opposed of the combatants — the 
Germans and the French. And now from Pan- 
Germanism we turn to Pan-Slavism, although at the 
beginning we must bear in mind that there is not 
the same unity, either of problem or of purpose, 
among the Slavs as there is among the Germans. 
Whereas German aims and ambitions are clear, con- 
crete, and urgent, Slav aspirations are vaguer, more 
temperamental, and less material. Perhaps that is 
why the Germans profess to dread the Slav oncoming, 
to regard their civilization as inferior to their own ; 
it is certainly different. 

It is thus much more difficult to deal with pan- 
Slavism, especially as so many Slav peoples are still 
subject peoples or else only of late emerged from sub- 
jection, than it was with the far compacter and more 
definite problems of Germany. Indeed, although I pro- 
pose to give some slight thread of history to keep my 
subject from breaking utterly loose, yet for the most 
part I shall aim at giving rather an impression of the 
sort of people the Slavs have struck me as being, 
in so far as I have been among them, because I 
feel this most strongly : we must know all we can 
about the sort of people who are helping us. Already 

IO J 45 



146 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

we have seen what the French stand for in the 
advance of humanity. We have also decided that 
it is necessary to study our German enemy if we are 
to cope with him successfully. Far more necessary, 
therefore, it seems to me, is it that we should get to 
know all we can of a people with whom we are as 
a rule but little in touch, about whom, therefore, 
we know little and have yet heard much that is mis- 
leading without being able to criticize what we hear, 
but who will ultimately have a greater effect than 
any other force in that vortex of forces we call the 
war. Slav ideals as much as Slav arms will influ- 
ence the settlement profoundly. The war is likely 
to lead to a Slav leadership of Europe. How im- 
portant it is, therefore, to get to know what the 
Slavs are like, what they stand for in the civiliza- 
tion of Europe, what, in the war of cultures which 
is behind, yet not far behind, all the actual field- 
fighting, Slavism really connotes. And in dealing 
with this vast and urgent problem I have preferred, 
or rather been compelled by ignorance, to rely more 
on my personal impressions than on my reading. 

The Germans are a compact but only recently 
united people in a Slav pocket ; the French are a 
still more compact people, who owe much of their 
achievement to highly centralized institutions dating 
back for centuries. But when we turn to the outer 
mass — the Slav pocket itself — what do we find? A 
people with common characteristics indeed, but also 
great diversities ; a people who stretch over vast 
tracts from the Arctic Circle right down into the 
deep-blue waters of the sub-tropical 'Mediterranean ; 
a people who include races as widely separated 
in space and characteristics as Poles and Serbians, 
Bohemians and Bulgars, Russians and Slovenians : too 
diverse almost for even the Sokol movement to unite. 

Now, in the presence of such diversity, what unify- 
ing principle can we discern? Well, once more we 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 147 

are driven back on religion for the net which, as in 
the miraculous draught of fishes, holds the mass 
together. 

When we were considering the break-up of Rome 
we found that the eastern flank of Christendom was 
protected for over a thousand years by Constantinople, 
the real bulwark of the west ; and it is this same 
Constantinople which really holds the Slavs together 
still, even though to-day it is the Turkish capital, 
and the head of the Christians there is almost power- 
less to resist the arbitrary exactions of the Mohamme- 
dans, who hold him responsible for the good behaviour 
of all the Christians throughout Turkey. 

Thus we have to take up our story at the point 
when the thousand years of Byzantine Christianity 
is succeeded by the five centuries of Moslem rule — 
at the point when St. Sophia ceases to be a Basilica 
and becomes a Mosque. Nor is the value of this 
starting-point vitiated by the fact that, of the western 
Slavs, the Poles are Roman Catholics ; while it was 
among their Slav neighbours, the Bohemians, that 
John Huss, influenced by our own Wicliffe, was 
preaching the Reformation before Luther, and suffer- 
ing martyrdom at the Council of Constance, saving 
Luther from a similar fate at Worms, perhaps, by 
the horror excited throughout Europe at the treachery 
of the Emperor, who let the Church burn Huss. I 
ought to say also that, though the Russian Church 
exists apart from that of Constantinople, although 
its language is a Russian which bears about the same 
relation to modern Russian that the English of the 
Old Testament bears to modern English, yet in its 
essentials it is at one with the Eastern Church, 
at one in its married priests, in its rejection of images 
and mechanical music, and in the intimacy of 
the relation between priest and people which arises 
out of the use of the common everyday language 
for the purposes of worship instead of a separate 



148 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

liturgical language like the Latin of the Church of 
Rome. 

I am glad to have hit on this beginning to my, 
subject, for not only is the eastern form of Chris- 
tianity the unifying fact of the Slavs as a whole, 
but also the word " religion " strikes the dominant 
note in the Slav character, particularly in Russia. 
The Russian alphabet is modelled on the Greek, Which 
came to Russia with Byzantine Christianity. Simi- 
larly Russian civilization is to-day organized on as 
definitely Christian a basis as was our own manorial 
system in the Middle Ages. 

So much by way of preliminary. We have just 
seen both the distribution and the unification of the 
Slavs. Let us now see what the downfall of the 
eastern capital in 1453 meant to these peoples. 
To Europe generally it meant first the Renaissance, 
then the Reformation. But what did it mean to the 
Slavs? 

To the Balkan Slavs it meant submergence, though 
not extinction. I have already mentioned the 
Patriarch of Constantinople, and described him as 
existing, as it were, on sufferance in the Turkish 
capital. The Turks have a very rudimentary notion 
of the State. With them State and Church are 
one. They, too, like the old Jews, are theocratic, 
with God as their actual King and the Sultan simply 
as His Viceroy. When, therefore, they had to control 
a conquered people of another faith than their own, 
the only machinery they could think of for the pur- 
pose was the organization which already held the 
Slavs together as a single people — the Eastern 
Church ; and thus the Head of the Eastern Church, 
the Patriarch of Constantinople, became to the Turks 
a sort of Vicegerent or Viceroy of Christ on earth, 
subject to the Sultan, who was Vicegerent of Allah. 
During the last five centuries, then, the Balkan 
Christians have been living a curiously unsatisfying 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 149 

life. Buried, overrun, and controlled, though not 
ruled, by a people whose one achievement and only 
strength lies in its fanatical fighting power, the 
Christian Slavs of the Balkans have lived in a state 
of unprogressive, suspended animation, never really 
crushed by the Turks, but so sealed up and cut off 
from the progressive Christian world beyond the 
frontiers of Turkey that they have fallen centuries 
behind Western Europe in civilization, yet without 
ev'er losing either their religion or their sense of 
nationality. 

In speaking of Islam I pointed out what a stimu- 
lating effect the faith produced on backward and 
savage races by the clear-cut creed and positive rules 
of conduct which Mohammed had provided in the 
Koran. Now, however, we see that when Islam 
comes into contact with a higher civilization and 
a more spiritual faith than its own, it cannot kill 
that faith and civilization, but merely checks its 
development. Progress is unknown in Mohammedan 
countries, either among the True Believers or among 
their subject peoples. 

So much for the Balkan Slavs. What about the 
rest? 

Now the Turks were not content with having con- 
quered merely the Balkans. Crossing the Danube 
and streaming north-west, they made as though they 
would reach the Baltic and thus drive a wedge in 
between Eastern and Western Christendom — between 
Germany and Russia that is to say. But they were 
stopped and turned back by a Slav people that has 
now long ceased to exist as an independent State — 
the Poles. 

In 1683 John Sobieski, King of Poland, defeated 
and drove back the Turks who were threatening 
Vienna, and so rendered Christendom the same ser- 
vice as Charlemagne nine hundred years earlier. But 
how different was his reward ! Whereas Charle- 



ISO THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

magne was made Emperor and ruler over the West, 
Poland was cut up again and again. Whenever its 
neighbours, from the days of Frederick the Great 
onwards, wished to expand, they did so at the ex- 
pense of a Polish province or two. And thus for 
over a century Poland was subject to a series of 
vivisections, until at last there is nothing left of 
the original State. In its stead we find three por- 
tions : one German, one Austrian, and one Russian. 
Probably the Poles themselves are partly to 
blame for this disaster. They were a very quarrel- 
some and disunited people, and their internal dis- 
sensions, of course, helped their enemies to dismember 
their native land. It might not, indeed, be fanciful to 
describe them as a people of over-developed artistic 
temperament : too individual and impatient of re- 
straint, too eager for self-expression ever to be welded 
into a great national whole ; too Greek in temper 
to become a solid Imperial people like the Romans 
or the English. At any rate, the world is full of 
Polish artists to-day, and we may well imagine that 
Paderewski, the De Reszkes, and many others one 
could name are only the fine flower and perfect 
realization of a national yearning after artistic ex- 
pression. I had once a Polish friend whose name — 
of eleven letters — had long been famous in the annals 
of his race. He came over to England to look 
into our educational system, and when he was going 
back he made me an offer. He was anxious to start 
a school in Poland for the sons of nobles and in- 
fluential men, and he asked me whether I would 
go with him and help him in his work. I asked 
what he would wish me to teach, and I was rather 
surprised at his reply. He said he was extremely 
anxious to introduce Association football among his 
fellow-countrymen, and since in those days I was 
still a player he wanted me to teach the boys foot- 
ball — not Rugby, which he regarded as too much 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 151 

of a hurly-burly, nor yet cricket, which was too 
individualized, but Association, which seemed to him 
to combine in ideal proportions the usually conflict- 
ing excellences of individual brilliancy and combined 
action. I refused, since in those days I was head 
of a school of my own ; but sometimes I regret that 
I did not go over and help him nurture among his 
beloved people — he always spoke of them, though 
divided among three Empires, as one — the spirit of 
united action and individual sacrifice which he saw 
immanent in our national winter game, and which was 
so necessary, he felt, to Polish unity. Elsewhere, also, 
on the Continent I have come across the same belief 
in football. I have already mentioned French Rugby 
teams, and, apart altogether from the big inter- 
national matches which English teams play regu- 
larly now in so many European centres, one finds 
attempts at football throughout Germany — solemn 
pot-shotting at goal on gravel grounds through 
blazing Sunday afternoons in mid- August. When 
one comes back to England in September and finds 
oneself in the presence once more of the machinery 
of the League and the Southern League, and the 
Second Division and Heaven knows what, one 
wonders whether even in our sports we have not 
killed the spirit by over-developing the medium, and 
thus allowed materialism again to conquer, as is 
our national weakness in most things. One sees 
the point of the German caricature in which the 
English soldier is saying, '* Well, if we can't beat 
the Germans in battle we can always beat them at 
football ! " 

So much for the curiously related subjects of 
Poland and football. Napoleon's idea of a reinstated 
Poland, followed as it has been by the offer of 
Nicholas II almost exactly a hundred years later, 
is only an act of reparation to a State who, with 
all her faults, has done much for the cause of 



152 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Christendom, and suffered much at the hands of her 
neighbours. Perhaps, in view of her past, it will 
be as well for the new Poland to exist under the 
protection of the one Empire of the three who is of 
the same Slav race and has had the courage to say, 
" Peccavi " and to offer atonement and reparation to 
the people it has so grievously wronged in the past. 
Certainly Prussian treatment of Poland has been un- 
sympathetic. The Prussian believes in making him- 
self felt, and his training is such that even if he 
believed in conciliation and peaceful absorption he 
would find himself debarred, by the effects of two 
centuries of drill-sergeantry and forty years of 
master-morality, from practising methods milder than 
those he has always used on peoples under his rule. 
Austria is kinder, it is true, but nevertheless Austria 
is German. So only Russia remains as the protector 
Poland would certainly need in a reconstituted 
Europe. 

Let us turn now to Bohemia, a corner of Europe 
which, as far as I can judge, seems to have been 
almost entirely forgotten during the present struggle. 
Yet it, too, has played its part in its day in the affairs 
of Europe. " Good King Wenceslas " was King of 
Bohemia ; his statue stands on the bridge over the 
Moldau at Prague. It was from the blind King of 
Bohemia, who was killed at Crecy in 1346, that the 
Prince of Wales took the three feathers which form 
his badge. Anne of Bohemia was wife to our English 
King Richard II, and may have been instrumental in 
bringing back Lollardry to her own people from 
England (I believe that ancient copies of Wicliffe's 
works have been found in the libraries of Prague). 
Huss I have already spoken about ; but the Reforma- 
tion owes yet another step to Bohemia, because it 
was the driving out of the Elector Palatine and his 
wife, " the Winter Queen," as she was called (she 
was a daughter of James I of England, sister to 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 153 

Charles I, and mother of Prince Rupert, of our 
own Civil War ; at Heidelberg still 1 stand the 
remnants of the wing of the castle which her husband 
prepared for her) — it was their flight from Prague 
that started the Thirty Years War and which had 
such terrible effects in Germany, as we have already 
seen. 

Yet, in spite of this close connection with Euro- 
pean events of the first importance, in spite even of 
its repeated connection with our own history, we 
have forgotten altogether about Bohemia, and when 
we hear of the Czechs we wonder who they are. We 
may have heard of Austrian regiments surrounding 
and shooting down Czech regiments, and thereupon 
have probably concluded that the Czech is some sort 
of Russian, and so turn to see what the German 
Emden, who sank £2,000,000 worth of ships in her 
three months as commerce -raider, or a British 
aeroplane has been doing. But the Czechs are not 
Russians ; they are Bohemians. 

Now, why should these people have been for- 
gotten when other Slav peoples are exciting so much 
interest? I think it is because they are in a German 
pocket, just as the Germans in their turn are now 
in a Slav pocket ; in other words, the Czechs are so 
surrounded by the Pan-Germans — i.e. Germany on 
one side, Austria on the other — that they seem almost 
stifled, just as the Germans proclaim that unless they 
hack their way through they also will be stifled by 
the Pan-Slavic mass of the Russians and their wing 
the Balkan peoples. Yet I think there may be an 
end of the oblivion under which the Czechs suffer. 
If the silent Hradchin, that desolate range of palaces 
on the heights above the shallow Moldau at Prague, 
should become the temporary seat of the Austrian 
Government in the course of the varying fortunes of 
war, the interest of Europe in Prague will revive. 

I was in Prague a few years ago, and well 



154 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

remember the impression of quiet and grave beauty 
that this ancient capital of Bohemia made on me. 
I had gone from Dresden up the Elbe by steamer 
as far as Bodenbach — and there is no finer or cheaper 
holiday stretch of river in Europe than that of the 
Elbe through Saxon Switzerland ; it beats the Rhine 
hollow — and then on by train. At the hotel I found 
that the porter had perfected himself in English. 
He had learned it from textbooks and the study of 
our best literature. His diction was therefore slow 
and distinguished, and he was delighted with the 
opportunity of practice which I gave him. " For/' 
he said, " we are but rarely visited. On the one 
hand, our language presents difficulties ; on the other, 
our town is liable to demonstrations." 

To demonstrations ! I felt rather curious and 
looked out for demonstrations next day ; and I found 
them sure enough, since the next day happened to 
be the birthday of the Emperor of Austria, and the 
great black and yellow flag of Austria was to be seen 
streaming from the highest windows almost to the 
pavement of many a house. But for every black and 
yellow flag thus pushed forth another was flown of 
Bohemian colours — red and white, as long and still 
more striking. Thus the battle of nationality waved 
up and down the streets throughout the day, while 
when the evening closed in and the most beautiful 
light effects I ever remember to have seen began to 
displace the rioting colour of the afternoon, the 
regimental bands, which climbed with many a halt 
the steep streets towards the Hradchin, playing 
wherever they halted (the big drum, I noticed, was 
mounted on a light horse -trailer), were followed by 
crowds more critical than enthusiastic, until at last, 
at the top of the long climb, the band played its final 
tune in front of the Cardinal's palace, and his 
Eminence came out on the balcony from the inner 
light of the dining-room and bowed his thanks. There 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 155 

at last the band seemed to find full appreciation, 
because the Emperor is most closely linked with the 
Holy See ; he is still the shadowy sovereign of that 
ancient Empire whose rule was the joint rule of Pope 
and Emperor. And thus it was that the Cardinal 
left his soup to bow to the band while the Prague 
folk looked quizzically on. But if one happens to 
be in Carlsbad or Marienbad on the Emperor's birth- 
day one will see nothing but black and yellow. Red 
and white is nowhere to be seen. Yet both are in 
Bohemia. But they are also, alas ! denationalized, 
cosmopolitanized, and given over to the disgusting 
cure of obesity. They " cure " the alimentary canal 
of Europe after its too heavy dinners, and tone it up 
to conquer the winter series as far as possible — and 
such a process needs calm : the red and white of 
a forgotten nationality would be out of place in an 
area consecrated to such great purposes. 

In my further journeying through Prague I came 
to yet another evidence of the intensity with which 
the Bohemian — think of actually being a Bohemian 
by birth ! — fights for his national existence. I came 
to the Czech Theatre — a noble building on the banks 
of the Moldau which costs the Bohemian Govern- 
ment I know not how many thousands a year, prob- 
ably from five to ten. And its maintenance is for 
one single purpose : to keep alive the Czech language 
at a literary standard, and, with that, the Czech 
nationality. 

We have already seen the importance of language 
in the maintenance of nationality and the attempts 
of the Germans to kill alien tongues. We have also 
seen the place occupied by the theatre in foreign 
schemes of national well-being. When therefore we 
combine these two influences we can understand how 
the Bohemians regard their theatre. So far from 
being a mere place of amusement for an occasional 
evening, it represents their national existence, the 



156 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

focus and altar of their patriotism. It is the shrine 
of Bohemia. It serves, indeed, the same purpose 
as a Welsh or Gaelic church, but with this difference : 
the Celts of Great Britain have no terrible alien 
pressure to resist ; they are free and welcome — nay, 
encouraged — to keep up their national language 
and literature. The Government pays grants for 
the teaching of Welsh in the schools j it is 
the Celts' own fault if ever it dies down ; even the 
Irish are free to revive their ancient speech (in 
Dublin the streets are named both in Irish and in 
English) if they wish. But in Bohemia the tongue 
has to fight against authority, and recently the fight 
was carried, I believe, even into the command words 
of the Army. Thus we see that the theatre, so far 
from being at the other pole from the Church, comes 
nearer to it, perhaps, in the case of this Czech 
theatre than it has ever been since the days of Greece 
and the Miracle Plays of mediaeval Europe. 

Another point which struck me was the intensity 
of the Bohemian's admiration of the beauty of his 
capital. Whereas in the days of my visit the picture - 
postcards of German towns were as a rule crudely 
tinted photographs, those of Prague were either 
beautiful reproductions of water-colour drawings (I 
saw several artists working on new views during 
my stay) or else little etchings, or else photographs 
taken at night to show the effects of artificial light 
on familiar scenes — an idea which was developed 
with success several years later as regards London. 

Now, surely a people with such a history and such 
capacities for the beautiful ought not to be ignored 
in the European settlement. What can be done for 
them I do not know ; I do not even know what they 
want. But I would give something to see the veil 
lifted from the face of Prague — and it ought to be 
possible to discover why she mourns. 

Spruner's Historical Atlas shows Bohemia existing 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 157 

as a Duchy in 843, when, as we saw, the division 
of Verdun split Charlemagne's Empire into three. 
At the same date there was no Austria, and the name 
of Vienna does not even figure on the map. For 
long Bohemia marched, border by border, with her 
northern Slav neighbour Poland. Later, however, 
Bohemia and Poland were separated by Silesia, which 
was originally a Polish province but became Austrian, 
and later, through the high-handedness of Frederick 
the Great, Prussian. Whether it would be possible 
so to reconstitute Poland as to take her borders all 
the way to Bohemia and thus lift Bohemia herself 
out of the German pocket, and so make her the 
western advance guard of Slavism, which would 
then stretch continuously eastward from Bohemian 
Carlsbad through Poland into Russia, and at the 
same time, for her protection, also to make her 
another vassal State of Russia, like reconstituted 
Poland, is more than I can say. 

So, then, we must leave these two distinguished, 
artistic, but forgotten western Slav States with these 
words : It has been their fate as the frontiers of 
Slavdom to fall victims piecemeal to the encroach- 
ments of the Teutons from the west. How far they 
can and should be recovered from their present 
Teutonic holders is a very big question, for the 
settled rule of centuries — as, e.g., in the case of 
Pomerania, West Prussia, and Silesia — may well make 
fundamental changes in a people's outlook ; and 
it would be as great a mistake now to dismember 
Germany in the interests of Spruner's maps of 
mediaeval Europe as it was originally to dismember 
Poland herself. It would not only be a crime but — 
what is worse — also a blunder, since it would start 
an agitation for the retransference to Germany of 
provinces which, in the dim and distant past, were 
doubtless Polish, but which by long association with 
Germany by this time have become predominantly 



158 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

German. Evidently some sort of provincial plebiscite 
is required, the sort of vote suggested during the 
Home Rule debates for our own Ulster counties, 
together perhaps with some such re-sorting of the 
various populations as has settled the religious 
troubles of Swiss cantons, where Roman Catholics 
and Protestants, once mixed, concentrated themselves 
by mutual agreement in specified districts. But 
whatever may be the upshot of the war as far as 
Poland is concerned, it should not be forgotten that 
Bohemia also is Slav, that she too has her troubles, 
and therefore her claim on the Allies. At present 
all we can say is that it is perfectly easy to see why 
some /Austrian regiments surrender so readily to the 
Russian forces. Austria feels the pull of the Slavs 
on her northern as well as on her southern frontiers ; 
she is now paying the penalty of having grown at 
the expense of the Slavs by finding it increasingly 
difficult to keep the loyalty of the rapidly increasing 
Slav peoples under her rule when they are attracted 
by the success of their fellow-Slavs both in Russia 
and in the Balkans and yet sent to fight against 
them. The dominant race in an Empire built up of 
such a diversity of peoples as that of Austria must 
have a remarkably tough and quick digestion if the 
various peoples it swallows to increase its size are 
to be assimilated sufficiently to increase the power 
of the Imperial State and not to prove a source of 
weakness in the day of battle. And the Germans 
have no such power of assimilation ; they tend, 
indeed, rather to be assimilated, as we have seen 
earlier. 

Let us turn now from these northern Slavs that 
we have been dealing with, the Slavs to the north of 
Austria, to the less developed southern Slavs — those, 
namely, in the Balkans to the south of Austria, 
who have been the immediate cause of all the trouble. 

When first the war broke out many people asked 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 159 

me in amazement how it was that a little State like 
Serbia could set Europe by the ears as it has done. 
To clear up this difficulty I must now enlarge on 
what I said earlier about the Balkan Slavs. 

We have already seen that these Slavs lived for 
centuries in a state of suspended animation, keeping 
alive as far as religion and nationality were con- 
cerned, but merely marking time while the rest of 
Christendom were marching along the path of 
civilization. So long as Turkey remained a solid 
Power south of the Danube these peoples had no 
chance ; but early in the nineteenth century the 
Turkish Empire — a merely militarist dominion with- 
out any claim to governing skill or statesmanship — 
began to break up, and gradually the Christian States 
of the Balkans, stimulated by the enthusiasm of the 
French Revolution, began to emerge either as inde- 
pendent nations or else as principalities more or 
less tributary to Turkey. We in England were, of 
course, most interested in the Greek struggle for 
independence because the Greeks were helped by 
Lord Byron, but we must not forget that this was 
only one State among several who were all working 
towards the same end — freedom from Turkey. This 
movement has continued from that day to this, and 
is even yet not finished. 

Byron was not much impressed by the Greeks he 
helped ; indeed, he said — 

For Greeks a blush, for Greece a tear, 

or words to that effect ; and I must confess that 
the other Balkan peoples carried on their respec- 
tive Wars of Liberation (at about the same date, 
be it noted, that Prussia was building up her 
strength in those wonderful years which succeeded 
her own War of Liberation) by methods not im- 
measurably superior to those of the Turks they were 



160 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

fighting against. Nor should the impartial student 
wonder at that or blame them. It was not their fault 
that they had emerged in the nineteenth century 
with the ethics and morals of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth, that they had been effectively preserved 
from the decay of progress (as Nietzsche and Bern- 
hardi would doubtless call it) by the all-pervading 
presence of militant Mohammedanism. But it is 
very much to the credit of the Balkan Slav States, 
and also an indication of the stimulating power of the 
French Revolution, that they emerged at all from the 
stagnation of an alien race and faith, the brutalizing 
effects of which cannot but have left their mark on 
the peoples who so bravely struggled free from it 
in the course of the nineteenth century. 

Thus it comes to pass that the Serbians, the 
Bulgarians, and the others step on to our stage like 
young men who have somehow escaped the vigilance 
of the school attendance officer and thus missed all 
the advantages of compulsory Board School educa- 
tion. They are backward, but not therefore by any 
means necessarily dull or malevolent. They may be 
fierce and quick to act, but they are not therefore 
prejudiced against the learning and civilization of 
the more fortunately placed among their Christian 
neighbours. Indeed, the younger generation of South 
Slavs seem to be much ahead of our own schoolboys 
as regards political instincts. Recently, for example, 
the Bosnian school-children went on strike as a protest 
against the action of Austria. In the matter of 
appliances also the Balkan States are only too ready 
to avail themselves — as were the Japanese — of all 
that Western Europe can offer. I do not mean 
to suggest that Serbian ambulances or Bulgarian 
artillery are sixteenth or seventeenth or even nine- 
teenth century organizations. What I had in mind 
was rather the way in which they used their forces, 
the steps they were prepared to take to secure their 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 161 

ends. But all the edge of what I should have had to 
say six months ago has been taken off by the German 
invasion of Belgium. Beside the horrors of that 
deluge the acts of Serbia I must speak about are 
relatively mild. Nevertheless, in themselves, and not 
in comparison with the latest practices of German 
culture, these acts must be termed — well, at least as 
barbarous as the French massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew, or the murders of Rizzio and Darnley in the 
history of Mary Queen of Scots. These are sixteenth- 
century events, and I have already described Serbia 
and the rest as sixteenth or seventeenth century in all 
but appliances. They have electric light, telephones, 
and machine guns, but they use them in a way that 
reminds us of the Tudors. Just as, however, in the 
matter of material they have become twentieth century 
with a vengeance, there is no reason to think that, now 
that they have finally shaken off the bondage of 
Turkey, they should not with equal quickness make 
up for lost time, and, taking a two-hundred-year leap, 
bring their ideas and methods into harmony with those 
of Western Europe — always excepting Germany, if 
we are to take her atrocities as representing her real 
character. 

What, then, are the incidents I have in mind? 
They are incidents which are important not only as 
indicating the temper and present development of 
the Serbians, but also as starting perhaps, certainly 
strengthening, the national forward movement in 
Serbia which has meant so much to us all. 

Some few years back high military officials broke 
into the sleeping apartments of the King and Queen 
of Serbia, murdered them, and threw their bodies out 
of the window, it is said with the knowledge if not the 
connivance of the Austrian Government. Then the 
conspirators invited a Serbian Prince who was at 
the time living at Geneva to take the throne. He did 
so, and as King Peter he showed himself a good deal 

ii 



1 62 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

more national and far less inclined towards Austria 
than had his predecessor, Alexander. He can also 
be credited with having translated Mill's * Liberty ' 
into Serbian, and with having fought for France 
in 1870. 

Now this coup d'etat was an undoubted act of 
violence, and for some three or four years Great 
Britain would have nothing to say to Serbia, just as 
the States refused to recognize Huerta in Mexico. 
But time brought kindlier feelings, and now we 
remember that Milton, our greatest poet after Shake- 
speare, advocated regicide ; while among the 
Cavaliers (only about two hundred and fifty years 
ago, and when England was by no means a barbarous 
State), " Killing no Murder," a pamphlet advocating 
the assassination of Cromwell, was held to be merely 
loyalty to Charles II, who had offered a price for 
the Protector's head, of which, by the way, a photo- 
graph recently appeared in a daily paper. (Cromwell 
was dug up out of Westminster Abbey at the 
Restoration in 1660, hung in chains at Tyburn, and 
his head stuck on Temple Bar. There it stayed 
till it rotted, and blew down one night into the arms 
of a watchman. He kept it as a curiosity ; hence 
the recent photograph with a wooden stake through 
the skull. Yet when we hear of a Turco carrying 
a dead German's head about with him in his knap- 
sack, we murmur, " How barbarous ! " We have 
travelled far indeed, so we think, in the last couple 
of centuries.) Perhaps " Arms and the Man," by 
Bernard Shaw, will help us to understand the Balkan 
character, with its curious contrasts and emotional 
facets. Anthony Hope has also made use of the 
fusion of modern and sixteenth-century civilizations 
which is to be found in the Balkans for his adventure 
stories, " The Prisoner of Zenda," and others. On 
the other hand, the poetry of a primitive people is 
still to be found among the Serbians — who lost all 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 163 

their nobles in their fight against the Turks — and the 
bards and professional versifiers who tell the troops 
around the camp fires the stories of the great heroes 
of Old Servia add to these ancient stories the 
stories of great deeds done in the three wars which 
Serbia — in utter defiance of the theories of Mr. 
Norman Angell — has carried or is carrying through, 
because she is still able to provide food and war 
material. 

Nor must we forget that these Slav peoples are 
also religious enthusiasts. The Bulgarians, who in 
temper seem to be more the Prussians of the Balkans 
than are the Serbians, were buoyed up in their war 
against Turkey by the prospect of singing once more 
a Te Deum in the Hagia Sofia at Constantinople. 
That in itself would have been a sufficient reward. 
They might have marched out of the city after the 
Te Deum with the feeling that they had won. It 
reminds one of Henry of Navarre and his famous 
' Paris is worth a Mass/' Unfortunately, the 
Bulgarians were never in a position to test the relative 
strength of their motives as regards Constantinople, 
for they never reached the Turkish capital ; and 
Germany, at any rate, and perhaps others were glad 
to have the Turk's head still in chancery on the 
Bosphorus, since Turkey's body had been dismem- 
bered and the balance of Europe entirely destroyed 
in consequence. (The entry of Turkey into the war 
makes no vital difference except to herself. She 
began too late and too obviously under German 
coercion to stampede Islam into a religious war. 
Islam was already fighting for France, England, and 
Russia ; and thus Turkey failed to do the damage 
which the Germans hoped for when they forced her to 
fight.) 

It speaks well for the future of the Balkans that 
the present difficulties of Serbia have not been too 
strong a temptation for Bulgaria, whom Serbia de- 



1 64 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

feated, when the creation of an artificial Albania in 
the interests of Austria had cut Serbia off from the 
Adriatic and compelled her to try to get to the 
./Egean — an enterprise in which she had to meet the 
rivalry of her former ally. As to the future we can 
say nothing — as to what Roumania, Greece, and Italy 
may or may not do during the present war, and how 
the Balkans may settle down in the near future. I 
may, however, have suggested something in the way 
of a line along which one may be able to think oneself 
into the future ; that is all a historian can claim 
to do. 

The road is now clear for dealing with the greatest 
by far of all the Slav States, Holy Russia herself ; 
and as I think of her vast extent, her endless variety, 
her limitless resources, my courage almost fails me. 
But I hope to steer my way through by following 
the principle I laid down at the beginning of this 
essay — to write as far as I can from personal experi- 
ence, and to keep just a thread of history to serve 
as a controlling line through the intricacies of my 
subject. 

Another name for Russia is Muscovy, for a 
Russian a Muscovite. These names remind us of 
the days when Moscow, and not that new city on the 
Neva which we used to call St. Petersburg, but which 
we are now gradually learning to call Petrograd, 
was the capital of Russia. 

Into the still further past, into the days when 
Kieff was the capital and civilization was entering 
Russia from Sweden under leaders like Rurik, and 
Christianity was working northwards from Constanti- 
nople, we need not plunge. 

When I went through the private apartments of 
the Czars at Tsarske Selo, I saw many intimate 
details which were strongly contrasted with the 
gorgeousness of the State apartments upstairs. But 
one relic impressed me above all the others. This 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 165 

was a long iron rod, sharpened at one end, which I 
was allowed to hold for a moment. It was the rod 
of Ivan the Terrible, who ruled in Moscow during the 
reign of our Queen Elizabeth — indeed, ambassadors of 
Elizabeth visited him. And it was his fierce custom 
(he was probably mad) to thrust this spear of his 
through the feet of those who stood before him with 
evil tidings. The spear reminded me of Saul in his 
darker moods. But it also reminded me how remote 
from our own day was the Russia of even three 
centuries back. 

Three hundred years ago the present ruling House, 
the House of Romanoff, came to the throne. They 
were nobles or Boyars among fellow-nobles, and ruled 
much as the early French kings ruled, as first among 
equals. (The word " peer ' means, indeed, equal 
with the King.) But we need not trouble ourselves 
with the greater part of these three centuries during 
which Russia is more Asiatic than European in its 
mode of life, save, of course, that it is Christian. 
It is not, indeed, until our own Dutch William is 
well planted on the English throne and using English 
armies against his powerful foe and neighbour in 
Holland, Louis XIV, that Russia becomes important 
to us ; but from that moment its importance is con- 
tinually and rapidly increasing. 

In the reign of William III, then, the people of 
Chatham had a surprise : nothing less than the 
appearance of a Russian Czar in their midst, moving 
about the dockyards and building slips, and not only 
studying but also helping in the construction of the 
wooden walls of Old England. This unconventional 
potentate, who liked to go about as a common work- 
man, was, of course, Peter the Great — a very different 
figure from Frederick the Great, whose service to his 
State was almost all of it fighting service, whereas 
Peter gave most of his energies to dragging his 
people into contact with Western Europe when he 



1 66 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

had once broken the bonds which held them down. 
These bonds were of two sorts — hostile Powers to the 
north and south of his inland State round Moscow, 
and a strong aristocracy entrenched behind imme- 
morial custom and with all the immobility of the 
East in their souls. It was against both these that 
Peter threw himself with an energy that was bound 
to shear its way through all obstacles. 

He broke the power of Sweden under Charles XII, 
who was trying to play the part on the mainland 
played in the Thirty Years War by his predecessor, 
Gustavus Adolphus, and in breaking the Swedish 
monopoly of the Baltic he brought Russia within 
measurable distance of West Europe. He also broke 
the power of the Cossacks to the south of him and so 
reached out another hand to the Black Sea. 

But this stretching of the Russian giant as he 
awoke from his age-long sleep under the blows of the 
violent Peter was a painful process. His limbs 
cracked and he groaned aloud, but still Peter kept 
on. When his nobles refused to trim their beards and 
cut their hair in accordance with the fashion Peter 
had brought home with him from abroad, Peter 
sheared them like so many sheep, it is said, with his 
own hands. At any rate, before long he had turned 
his sleepy, indolent, Oriental Court of Moscow into a 
very passable imitation of the jack-bootedness of 
Berlin, for just as Prussia was influenced by 
France, so was Russia influenced in her turn by 
Prussia. 

But so long as Russia remained buried in verst 
after verst of plainland she would never really 
awaken. At Moscow, with its many gilded churches 
and its bells and beauty, it was always afternoon ; a 
more bracing capital was required. 

Moreover, Peter had grasped the importance of the 
sea on his visits to Holland and England — both at 
that time, of course, under one ruler, William of 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 167 

Orange. Hence the great move north-eastwards 
which so dismayed his nobles. Peter had deter- 
mined on a new capital, and had fixed on the swamps 
of the Neva (of all places) as the site : a cold and 
dreary region, frozen hard for months at a time — and 
so very different from Moscow. 

Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the ardent 
Czar, and the work proceeded — the titanic work of 
building a new capital on a swamp with a violent 
river hurling down blocks and sheets of ice from the 
great inland sea, Ladoga, that it drains, and bursting 
its banks as often as it had been confined for a space. 
Even to-day this city of Peter suffers from the 
violence of the winter frosts, and is being continually 
rebuilt in consequence. But nothing daunted Peter, 
and bit by bit the city rose. When I was there in 
191 2 I made a point of seeing the log hut Peter 
put up, the first house of the new capital, and the 
house in which he lived during the long progress of 
the work. It is now covered over, and visited in the 
same spirit as that other spot which has been covered 
over by the costliest church in Europe — the point on 
a canal side where the enlightened Alexander II, 
the liberator of the Serfs, was assassinated in 
1881. 

Peter was then a greedy worker at the actual 
details as well as at the great outlines of domestic 
progress. He had dragged his people to the sea 
which let in the world of the West ; albeit he had 
nothing better to offer them on the coast than an 
artificial town, planted by main force on the swampy 
banks of a turbulent river, and of so provisional a 
nature that even to-day it looks unfinished and Wild 
West-like, with roughly cobbled streets and many 
wooden houses, which, during the hot days I spent 
there, blazed up night after night and lit the sky first 
in one direction and then in another, till I grew quite 
used to the nightly glare. Among the buildings thus 



1 68 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

destroyed, by the way, happened to be a wooden 
theatre put up by Peter on an island. 

Peter's death is of a piece with his life. On 
the banks of the Neva — at last restrained by heavy 
stone copings, though still groaning and crunching 
with ice-floes every spring — stands a group in bronze 
representing this most human of all autocrats 
struggling out of the water with a half-drowned 
sailor. It was from the exhaustion of this rescue that 
Peter died. Can we wonder at the Russians calling 
their Czar " Little Father"? 

Another extremely interesting statue in Peter's 
City is that of an Empress — the remarkable woman 
who took up and carried on the work of Peter after 
a period of over thirty years' confusion had greatly 
weakened what Peter had accomplished. This woman 
was Catherine II, and she is quite as worthy of being 
called " the Great " ,as Peter himself. There she stands 
alone on her pedestal, while round the base are 
grouped the men she befriended, and among them the 
one-eyed Potiomkin about whom Bernard Shaw wrote 
his amusing little piece " Great Catherine." 

It was with Catherine that German influence grew 
strongest. She was German, and her husband, Paul, 
had died somewhat mysteriously ; nevertheless it was 
she and Potiomkin who started Russia on that road 
of territorial expansion which she has continued to 
tread ever since. 

This expansion was all with one more or less con- 
scious object. Like Imperial Germany, Russia had 
come too late into European politics, and was too 
deeply embedded in the land, too far from the sea 
to gain the easy and ample access to the open ocean 
which her future demanded. It is true that Peter 
had thrust one arm north and planted St. Petersburg 
and another south to Odessa, but a look at the map 
shows how useless these two centres really are from 
the point of view of sea power. The Baltic is a 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 169 

land-locked sheet with the key in the hands of Den- 
mark. The Black Sea is doubly — nay, trebly locked : 
by the Bosphorus, then by the Dardanelles, both in 
Turkish hands, and lastly — for the Dardanelles lead 
only into the land-locked Mediterranean — by England 
at Gibraltar and Suez. 

Nor did the capture of Finland at a later date 
from Sweden improve matters, for Finland is simply 
a Baltic State. All that the capture of Finland (a 
Magyar or Hunnish State in origin) really did for 
Russia was to give her a constitutional people to 
subdue and to earn her the enmity of Sweden, who 
had lost the province. That is why Sweden, though 
neutral, is somewhat well disposed towards Germany 
in the present war. At any rate, in view of the 
Czar's wise liberality towards Poland, it is not per- 
haps expecting too much to hope that he will find 
himself able to make a similar offer to his enlightened 
Finnish subjects. 

As regards the Black Sea outlet Russia has been 
no more fortunate. She has fought two wars 
in this region, and in neither has she been suc- 
cessful in overcoming the difficulties of her position 
and reaching freely even the land-locked Mediter- 
ranean. 

First there was the Crimea, in which she had to 
fight the allied armies of France and England. Then 
again in 1877 Russia fought a second time for a way 
out of the Black Sea. She championed — as she has 
done ever since — the Christian subjects of Turkey, 
that stands astride both the Bosphorus and the Dar- 
danelles like a Colossus, which, though crumbling, 
has never yet actually fallen. 

In this war Europe left Turkey to her fate at first, 
but, much to the surprise of Europe, Turkey was 
well able to look after herself. When, however, 
Russia really " got going," the days of Constantinople 
were numbered. Then it was that Europe intervened. 



170 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

The Jingo song of the great MacDermott crystallized 
the opinion of England thus : — 

We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, 

We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the 

money too ; 
We've fought the Bear before, and we'll fight the Bear again, 
But the Russians shall not have Constantinople. 

This, expressed rather more formally, was the 
opinion of the Congress at Berlin, at which the 
Treaty of Berlin was signed in 1878, and from which 
Disraeli and the young Lord Cranborne — afterwards 
Lord Salisbury — brought us " peace with honour ' 
— words to be seen among the wreaths which decorate 
Lord Beaconsfield's statue in Parliament Square on 
Primrose Day. It is this Treaty which states quite 
clearly the position of the various Balkan States — 
e.g. Bosnia and Herzegovina, provinces of Old 
Serbia, as protectorates of Austro -Hungary ; it is 
this Treaty, therefore, which Austria tore up, with 
the connivance of Germany, when she assumed full 
sovereignty over these provinces after the overthrow 
of Abdul Hamid by the Young Turk party — an act 
which marks, as we have seen already, the first stage 
in the developments which led to the present war. 

The only European port Russia has which stands 
on the open ocean is therefore Archangel, but that 
is terribly tucked away behind the North Cape, and, 
moreover, frozen half the year. Nevertheless it is 
an open way, and the legend of Cossacks coming 
through Archangel and thence through England to 
the battlefields of France shows that an eye to sea 
routes and constructive imagination are not so 
decayed among us as many people thought. 

So much, then, for Russia's position in Europe — a 
position like Germany's, only worse, since Germany 
has at least a North Sea coast. Fortunately, how- 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 171 

ever, Russia possesses what Germany has not got — 
a way out, a hinterland, and it is in the use she 
makes of her hinterland, Siberia, that the interest next 
centres. 

I remember a cartoon in Punch which represented 
Britannia as looking up at the starry skies. The 
drawing was called " What of the Night? " ; but in 
the next issue a letter appeared in the paper calling 
attention to a serious error in the composition : the 
Great Bear had been put in upside down. Punch 
was quick to reply, " Of course, because Russia 
has recently suffered a reverse in Asia." Those were 
the days when the Bear and the Lion faced each 
other on the Khyber Pass — the gap in our North- 
West Indian frontier ; of Abdur Rahman, Ameer of 
Afghanistan ; of expeditions galore, from Roberts' 
march to Kandahar to — well, I really forget the rest, 
I am ashamed to say. 

Foiled in Central Asia and in her projects on India 
— if ever she had any — Russia was driven still farther 
east, and determined on the heroic scheme of the 
Trans-Siberian Railway, which was to be Russia's 
road, she hoped, to the warm water, her deliverance 
from bondage to Denmark, Turkey, England, and 
the ice of Archangel. Unfortunately, however, no 
Russian Pacific port is really ice-free, and so Russia 
schemed to get one a good deal farther south. This 
she managed when she became possessed of Port 
Arthur, on the Yellow Sea. Soon this valuable port 
was linked up with the Trans-Siberian by a line 
running across Manchuria ; and Russia was always 
showing a tendency to spread from that line over the 
face of the Chinese province through which it ran. 
Now the eastward extension of Russia had already 
disturbed Japan, and Japan began to feel still more 
uneasy and angry when Russia seemed to be pre- 
paring to absorb Manchuria even than she had felt 
when Russia, Germany, and France had combined to 



172 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

force her to forgo the fruits of her victory in China 
in 1895 and Russia had kept Port Arthur for her- 
self. By 1897, then, Russia was established at Port 
Arthur, but with a very jealous, alert, and injured 
neighbour watching her intently across the water- 
Japan. When, therefore, Russia ventured still farther 
south and began to get concessions in the woods and 
forests of the queer peninsula of Korea, which hangs 
like a great tongue between Japan and China, Japan 
felt that she was bound to interfere. For a Russian 
occupation of Korea would have shut Japanese influ- 
ence out of China, and reduced Japan to the position 
of a string of unimportant islands off the coast of 
Asia. Japan felt towards Korea, indeed, exactly as 
we have always felt towards Belgium. She felt her- 
self bound, that is to say, to fight in the interest 
of her continental vis-a-vis ; and thus we arrive 
at the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, in which 
Japan enjoyed much the same sort of success as 
Turkey had enjoyed against Russia at the beginning 
of the war of 1877— i.e. Russia was beaten before 
she really " got going/' Her long line of rail- 
way ^ served her wonderfully, but nevertheless she 
fought at a tremendous disadvantage by reason of 
her distance from her base. A Japanese naval 
officer to whom I was once talking told me that the 
Japanese used often to wonder how ever the 
Russians managed to deal with their returned 
empties, for the rail was largely a single one, and 
it was not till he himself travelled over the rail after 
the war that he realized what the Russians had done. 
He said that there were no returned empties, or rather 
that much of the rolling-stock was never sent back 
at all, but was used at the rail-head for huts, sheds, 
even firewood. Such is the incidental waste of war. 
During the war, England, the ally of Japan, and 
France, the ally of Russia, kept the ring, and there- 
fore prevented the war from spreading to Europe. 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 173 

Nevertheless, the effects of the war were very wide- 
spread. The Japanese had won largely because of 
their philosophic contempt for death. Like the 
Chinese, the Japanese hold their life cheap, and are 
willing to lay it down at the command of their 
Emperor- Pope, " ancestored of the gods," and 
himself God Incarnate, the Mikado. Nor are the 
Russians any the less ready to lay down their lives 
for the Little Father in a cause which stirs them, 
but, as I heard Professor Vinogradoff say at Sheffield 
recently, the Russians did not believe in the war, 
and public support of it was not strong enough to 
overcome the drawbacks of bureaucratic inefficiency. 
It was, moreover, a war for seaports. When, there- 
fore, the Russian fleet was destroyed and Port Arthur 
taken, Russia could gain nothing by going on with 
the fight. Once more, then, Russia was repulsed from 
the warm water. 

But the effect of the war went farther even than 
that. We felt the effect in India, where the Oriental 
agitator was encouraged by the defeat of a great 
European Power by a small Eastern Empire. And 
of course Russia felt the effect even more severely 
than we did. 

It is remarkable how war has modified the course 
of internal development in Russia. The Crimea ulti- 
mately gave freedom to the serfs, and the Japanese 
War gave Russia the beginnings of a Constitution 
—the Duma — but not until a great revolutionary 
movement had first worked itself out, a movement 
which was stormy enough to drive the Czar for safety 
on to his yacht, and which reached its climax in 
the shooting of Father Gapon. I came back from 
Russia in 1 9 1 2 with English managers of Russian 
factories, who told me some grim tales of the period 
of internal trouble which succeeded the war. 

Having failed in her Far East project, Russia 
turned once more to the question of an outlet. At 



174 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

an earlier date she seemed to have thought that a 
port on the Persian Gulf might suit her purpose, 
and there were rumours that she might try to make 
of Koweit a second Port Arthur. But Lord Curzon, 
at the time Viceroy of India, undertook a viceregal 
voyage in the Persian Gulf, and thus advertised the 
fact of England's predominant interest in those waters. 
So there for the moment the matter rests. In 
1907 England and Russia squared their differences, 
and Russia established a controlling influence in 
northern Persia, while we looked more particularly 
over the south. But nothing was said or done about 
a warm-water port for Russia, and it is quite easy 
to imagine that so long as Russia does not get the 
outlet she needs she will never be really settled. Will 
she now get down to Constantinople, I wonder. 

For the time being, however, the question rests, 
and Russia has formed an alliance with her earlier 
enemy, Japan. As we also are allied with Japan a 
sort of informal Triplice has sprung up, and of course 
the Triple Entente in Europe includes also France : 
and thus we see how it is that five Powers are 
linked together against the Germans, and also how 
it is that Japan has seized the occasion of the present 
war to wrest from Germany the Chinese port she once 
held. Japan has a long memory, and we cannot 
wonder that she has taken this opportunity of aveng- 
ing herself on the Power which had organized the 
intervention that robbed Japan of the fruits of her 
triumph over China in 1895. 

We have thus brought the Russian story up to 
date. Russia again turns westward ; she once more 
faces the problems of her European position now 
that her hinterland or Siberian ventures have proved 
for the time being at least, abortive. 

In dealing with Germany and France I was careful 
to show, as best I could in so short a space, not 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 175 

only the steps by which they had reached their 
present position but also the sort of ideas and aims 
fostered in each ; and now that we have arrived 
at the end of our slight historical survey of Russia 
it is still more important to consider what are the 
ideas Russia believes in, what are the objects (other 
than the merely political objects we have been dealing 
with) that she keeps in view. 

I said that the Japanese War was responsible 
for a great deal — first for revolution, then for the 
Duma, and, lastly, perhaps even for the change of 
heart which has been the most striking feature of 
the present war. While this war has revealed 
Germany as a ruthless destroyer, it has shown to the 
world and to the Russians themselves that, given 
a great and intelligible cause, Russia can come 
together in a way which nobody who remembers 
the Japanese fiasco — and the Germans with their 
blinkered minds have remembered it so tenaciously 
that they seem to have had no room for any other 
notion about Russia — could believe to be possible. 

The spirit of Russia has at last managed, it would 
seem, to infuse itself into the Government ; and 
the Czar has apparently been able to use the new 
and wonderful unity of his people for freeing himself 
and the State, to some extent at least, from the 
bonds of bureaucracy. German methods, which have 
been more or less dominant since the days of 
Catherine the Great, seem to be falling into dis- 
credit and Slav methods seem to be taking their 
place. Thus Peter's city was renamed Petrograd. 
The Czar, by offering reconstitution and Home Rule 
to Poland, has taken only another step in the direc- 
tion he took when he bade his Minister reintroduce 
into the Duma a Bill for the restoration of the 
Polish language after the Bill had been rejected by 
the ex-bureaucrats who constitute the Council of 
the Empire. Again the Czar's personal note comes 



176 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

out clearly, I think, also in the following rescript 
after a journey through Russia to his Minister of 
Finance : — 

M To my profound sorrow I had to contemplate 
the mournful picture of popular debility, house- 
hold distress, neglected business — the inevitable con- 
sequence of an intemperate life — and occasionally the 
spectacle of popular enterprises deprived at critical 
moments of pecuniary aid in the form of properly 
organized and accessible credit. ... I have come 
to the firm conviction that the duty lies upon me, 
before God and Russia, to introduce into the manage- 
ment of the State finances and the economic problems 
of the country fundamental reforms for the welfare 
of my beloved people." 

As a result of this pronouncement the State is 
no longer to make revenue out of the sale of spirits, 
and the Russian Army is to avoid the drunkenness of 
the German. It is not so long since English Chan- 
cellors of the Exchequer used to say that if the 
Treasury were low England could always drink her- 
self solvent — that is to say, send up the revenue from 
Customs and Excise to the necessary height. Even 
to-day we spend £160,000,000 every year on drink, 
so we see how much in earnest the Czar must 
have been when he sacrificed a similar revenue in 
Russia. 

Lastly, the words of the Czar in his proclamation 
on the Austrian declaration of war strike an un- 
expectedly fine note — I mean a personal and by no 
means an official note, for he speaks of Russia going 
into the war with the Sword in her hand and the 
Cross in her heart — quite Russian, quite on the 
lines of his people's own thoughts, the very anti- 
thesis of the Kaiser's variants on the Ego et Rex 
me us (" I and the good old God above ") theme, 
in Whose Name Germans are to emulate those 
evanescent Huns of Attila. Such is the difference 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 177 

between the War Lord of the Germans and the Little 
Father of Holy Russia, who, on the three -hundredth 
anniversary of the accession of his house, made a 
pious pilgrimage to the relatively humble tombs and 
centres which are the real origins of the Imperial 
line. 

Let us turn now from the Czar himself to a great 
Russian, Paul Vinogradoff, who has been a Professor 
in Oxford for many years past. Recently he was 
offered a ministerial post in Russia — for Russia never 
renounces her claims to the services of Russians 
abroad : a denaturalized Russian is almost an 
apostate from the national faith — but he declined, 
since at that time he felt himself more advanced 
than the other members of the Ministry ; but as 
soon as war broke out he became a strong supporter 
of the Government, although to all intents and pur- 
poses he is a political refugee in our midst. This 
is how he speaks of his fellow-Russians : — 

M These simple people cling to a belief that there 
is something else in God's world besides toil and 
greed ; they flock towards the light and find it in 
the justification of their human craving for peace 
and mercy. For the Russian peoples have the 
Christian virtue of patience in suffering ; their pity 
for the poor and oppressed is more than an occa- 
sional manifestation of individual feeling — it is deeply 
rooted in national psychology. Their frame of mind 
has been scorned as fit for slaves ! It is a case where 
the learning of philosophers is put to shame by the 
insight of the simple-minded. 

" A book like that of General von Bernhardi would 
be impossible in Russia. If anybody were to publish 
it, it would not only fall flat but would earn its author 
the reputation of a bloodhound." 

Recently I heard this scholar, who speaks such a 
different language from that of the holders of so 
many German professorial chairs, lecture in Sheffield, 

12 



1 78 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and I gained from his lecture still further information 
with regard to the state of Russia. Eighty per cent, 
of the 170 millions of Russians are, he said, peasants ; 
hence the fine material of the Russian Army as 
noticed by Sir Ian Hamilton, who was with the 
Japanese Headquarter Staff in 1905. 

The Cossacks are yeoman farmers, holding their 
land on a feudal tenure ; but even the peasants are 
smallholders, and thus in a far better position than 
is our own landless agricultural labourer, dependent 
as he is on his employer's wages for his entire 
subsistence. Then, again, each Russian peasant com- 
munity enjoys such an amount of local self-govern- 
ment that it might be said that every village in 
Russia enjoys home rule, whereas we have seen that 
in Germany only the great towns enjoy it, and in 
England, as we well know, nobody enjoys it. 

Thus when we hear of England as the land of 
liberty and Russia as the land of oppression we 
have to ask : In what sense are these terms used? 
Who enjoys most opportunities of getting his own 
way — the Englishman with a vote he has a chance 
of using in a vague and complicated general election 
once every five years or so, but who is bound hand 
and foot by ground -landlords, leases, and a hundred 
and one other shackles, or the Russian, who is largely 
his own master on his own land, co-operates freely 
and extensively with his fellow peasant -proprietors 
in communal and farming enterprises, and may even 
have a vote for a Duma representative — if he wishes 
to use it? It is thus quite arguable that Russia with 
her self-governing village communities is the most 
free country in Europe in all essentials. Indeed, 
while in these respects Russia enjoys all the healthy 
freedom of the mediaeval manor, she has also 
managed to secure many of the benefits of an indus- 
trial system without suffering from the evils of 
Industrialism to anything like the same extent as that 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 179 

to which England is still suffering, and from which 
Germany escaped only by giving careful thought 
to every step she took. 

M. Vinogradoff was also hopeful as to the future 
of the Central Government. By a joint effort of 
the Ministry of Justice and the Universities, the 
Law Courts were reformed in the " glorious 'Sixties/' 
and he sees no reason why the Bureaucracy should 
not be similarly reformed — and with the Bureaucracy 
also the Police organization, which often works 
unfairly in rural districts. He sees also in the giving 
of honours to Jewish soldiers of distinguished service 
a prospect of full citizenship for Jews in Russia. 

Leaving now the words of the Czar and the scholar, 
let me give the experiences of a humble traveller. 
The first contact I had with Russia was distinctly 
bureaucratic. I, with all the others who had just 
reached the frontier, had to stand waiting by my 
baggage while my passport was examined ; and at 
St. Petersburg, again, the same passport was carried 
off to the police by the porter of the Evangelical 
hospice in which I stayed. But once these formalities 
were past, I found myself free to go where I would. 
I have already mentioned some of my wanderings. 
Now I propose to describe those only which have 
a bearing on the character of the Russians. The 
streets are of course full of instruction. One realizes 
in them how different the Russian officer is from the 
German and the Russian parish priest from the 
Roman Catholic. Both officers and priests are to 
be seen out shopping with their wives, the officers 
in uniform and often carrying parcels, the priests in 
wide, long-sleeved robes of black, deep blue, or 
dark purple and hair as long as their wives'. The 
churches too, with their wonderful unaccompanied 
singing — a great Te Deum on the Czarevitch's birth- 
day in the Kazan Cathedral, for example — their ikons, 
their devout crowds ; the droshky-drivers, with their 



180 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Oriental habit of bargaining ; the high prices every- 
where (the rouble of over two shillings goes about 
as far as a shilling in England) ; the way one can get 
in, if properly guided, to galleries and museums 
which are closed for cleaning (I shall never forget 
how the workmen and attendants in the Hermitage 
Gallery handled the masterpieces, standing two or three 
deep on the floor while the walls were being cleaned ; 
if we wished to see a picture which stood behind 
some others they moved those which were in the 
way almost as if they had been prints in a portfolio) ; 
the effect of perpetual sunlight produced by the light - 
blue glass in the Nicholas II Memorial Cathedral ; 
the bells and the sunsets ; the vast barges filled 
with logs ; the gilded spire of the Admiralty building 
and of the Peter- Paul Fortress church opposite it 
on the other bank of the Neva ; the perfectly English 
crowd of boys and girls ogling each other in the 
Embankment Gardens — all had their significance to 
the visitor who came across them for the first time. 
The places of amusement were still more full of 
interest to me. From the fashionable open-air 
orchestra promenade, supper-room suburb of Petro- 
pavlovsk, where the crowd made the band play 
Tchaikovsky instead of Wagner at the outbreak of 
the war, to the People's Palace at the back of that 
harmless old Bastile, the Peter-Paul Fortress, I wan- 
dered, continually learning. The People's Palace 
was a wonderful place. I paid, I think, about six- 
pence — the admission ticket bore a tax for the poor 
— and that amount made me free of the whole place. 
I could walk round the open-air orchestra or go 
into the theatre where Russian opera was being per- 
formed. Perhaps the biggest surprise I ever had 
in my life was when I saw opera-glasses lying about 
loose in the racks behind the seats in this theatre 
for the use of the audience. In some theatres in 
England managers tried a sixpence-in-the-slot opera- 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 181 

glass arrangement for a time, but I think it has been 
discontinued, possibly because the leakage in glasses 
was greater than the flow of sixpences. 

To a Russian, however, national opera is a sort 
of religion, and it would be almost sacrilege to 
carry off one of the vessels or instruments of the 
service. 

But my most illuminating experience was when I 
saw the Czar. He had arranged to review the Cadets 
— a sort of Boy Scouts body, which goes back, I 
believe, to the days of Peter the Great — and he 
came by water from Peterhof. The bridges were 
closed while he passed and the river kept clear. The 
crowd near the review ground was so great that 
although the policeman coolly took us out and placed 
us in front of people already in position (I felt 
terribly apologetic, but the people whose view we 
shut out seemed to take it as a matter of course), 
yet we saw practically nothing. So we decided to 
go down to the river and see the Czar return. Of 
course the embankment for some hundred yards on 
either side of the landing-stage was closed ; never- 
theless a sprinkling of people, chiefly women and 
children, were allowed along the pavement to pre- 
vent the area from looking bare, and, apparently 
because we were foreigners and looked harmless 
enough, we were allowed to join this sprinkling. 
There were of course plenty of soldiers and police, 
many of them in plain clothes, but so long as we did 
not stand with our toes overhanging the kerbstone 
they said nothing. Every now and then, however, 
a spectator would draw back an inch or two at some 
official's request. While we waited, a tug, with a 
barge in tow, came under the bridge, hooting loudly. 
Immediately a couple of police boats put off to 
order her back. In explaining to my companion 
what was going on, I happened to point once or 
twice ; whereupon a workman (in appearance) came 



182 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

up and said something to me — what, I knew not. 
My companion looked a trifle serious, and a by- 
stander said that I had been told not to point. I 
laughed, whereupon the disguised policemen round 
about, and the man who had spoken to me, laughed 
also. I was relieved at that, for if you laugh at a 
policeman in Germany you only make matters worse. 
Then, turning to my companion, I said I would put 
my hands in my pockets for fear I should uninten- 
tionally be making more signals, for such the police 
evidently took my pointing to be, but my companion 
said I had better not, because once the police had 
noticed me they might think I had bombs in my 
pockets. So, like an awkward actor or a boy recit- 
ing a poem, I did not for once know what to do 
with my hands. 

Soon after this the space filled up with naval 
officers in white summer uniforms, and the Czar came 
along. I had expected that he would have driven 
up to the landing-stage and just passed quickly into 
the boat ; but instead of that, he strolled leisurely 
out through the gates of, I think, the Marble Palace, 
with four Cossack officers before him, his son by 
his side and two of his daughters immediately behind 
him, then a group of secretaries and officials. Now 
I had thought that after all the precautions the 
police had taken nobody would have had the slightest 
chance of getting near the Czar. What was my 
surprise, therefore, to see a woman and a girl of 
about fourteen dart off the pavement some six yards 
from me and run quickly up to the Czar, kneel 
down, and hand him a couple of notes. He took them 
quietly and gently, handed them to an official, and 
passed on. 

The police made a rush — the presence of the Czar 
seemed to have hypnotized them : that is the only 
way in which I can account for their letting the two 
petitioners through. Now, however, to make up for 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 183 

their slackness, several of them took hold of the 
couple, and — I was watching closely all the time- 
simply led them back without any signs of violence 
or anger to the pavement/ The women were, of 
course, agitated, and the ^Czar's daughters looked 
round more than once at the group they made. But 
the point that impressed me was the homeliness and 
the gentleness of it all, the Little Father actually 
among his children. The dropping of butt-ends on 
toes which came too far forward, rough handling, 
lack of consideration, seemed almost impossible to 
imagine in the scene as I remembered it. Indeed, 
if it had all been arranged for a film producer it 
could not have been more pleasant. The film-pro- 
ducer would probably have demanded a good deal 
more heightening of the effect in the removal of the 
petitioners at any rate. 

I was told afterwards that petitions of this descrip- 
tion are as a rule for the better education of the 
petitioner's children, and that they are almost always 
granted. The petitioners are taken to the police- 
station, told that they have been indiscreet, because 
others might come with bombs instead of petitions, 
and then let 7 go. Such was Russia as far as I saw 
it in 1 91 2, the centenary of its triumph over 
Napoleon. 

Russians paying a visit to England are equally 
surprised. I well remember a couple asking me 
where the State Theatre, the State Opera, and the 
State Orchestra of Sheffield were to be found. One 
of the most objectionable sights in English towns 
was, in their opinion, the display of sets of grinning 
false teeth in the dentists' shops. Decayed teeth 
are almost unknown in Russia ; the Russians have 
not reached so far along the path of civilization 
as the false tooth. 

My Russian friends went to such theatres as we 
have in Sheffield, and reported that our players were 



1 84 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

good, but that our plays were naught. They went 
to hear the " 1812 " Symphony played in a music- 
hall, but came out when attendants behind the 
scenes fired off revolvers. "They used firearms/ ' 
they reported. Still more shocked were they when 
the Parks Committee fired off bombs during an open- 
air performance of the same symphony, and then put 
the finishing touch by calling them scenic effects. 
(And yet we profess to feel horror at atrocities !) 

How, then, are we to sum up the strange people 
whose calendar is just fourteen days behind our own, 
but whose civilization is in many ways in advance 
of our own ; what lesson can we draw from them? 

Professor Vinogradoff described the Russians as 
crusaders, and I think that enthusiasm in a great 
cause, which the term "crusader " implies, is a not- 
able characteristic of the Russians. They are a people 
of temperament and fervour, w r hereas their allies, the 
French, are a people of intellect and form, with the 
courage of their convictions by way of motive power. 
If the Frenchman embodies Reason, the Russian em- 
bodies Faith. The alliance is thus an alliance of the 
intellectual and the spiritual, with tenacity, the British 
bulldog, on the doorstep, not worried overmuch 
by ideas, ideals, Art, and all those moulding forces, 
which, unfortunately, he would rather leave to his 
Allies. 

The Russian temperament expresses itself in many 
forms : in religion, in eternal argument, in con- 
spiracy — read Joseph Conrad's " Under Western 
Eyes " — and secret societies, in music, in dancing, 
in fiction ; and the intense emotional and imaginative 
force of the race, w r orking towards expression in 
these so diverse media, has given to Europe the most 
wonderful imaginative art and literature of the last 
thirty years, while as for Russian music and Russian 
ballet, they are as much at home to-day and as 
welcome in London and Paris as they are in their 



THE SLAVS AND THEIR PROBLEMS 185 

native land. We have seen how readily the Art 
Theatre at Moscow took up Gordon Craig's work ; 
we have to admire the thoroughness of its whole 
year of rehearsal before his " Hamlet " was given to 
the public. We have but to turn to the works of 
Dostoieffsky (Laurence Irving's " Unwritten Law " was 
based on one of his novels, " Crime and Punish- 
ment M ), Pushkin, Tourguenieff, and Tolstoy, to see 
the Russian great in fiction ; to Verestchagin, in paint- 
ing ; Mendel^eff and Metchnikoff in science ; Pav- 
lova in dancing ; Tchertkoff in drama ; and Lydia 
Yavoska, who has recently brought Tolstoy's M Anna 
Keranina " round the provinces, and whose list of 
acted parts throws that of English actresses quite 
into the shade, in the art of the actor. 

And thus when we are faced with the fact of an 
alliance with a people so vast, so gifted, so spiritual, 
in many ways so different from ourselves, we are 
forced to admit that we have much to learn, many 
prejudices to fight down, and many misconceptions 
to set right. We find that the Russians speak of 
themselves and their future in the same tone of 
guarded hopefulness as is to be found among the 
Americans. Both are alike, indeed, in this, that both 
are citizens of new and rapidly developing States in 
which growing pains are a healthy sign. In 191 3, 
for instance, Russia's revenue was thirty millions 
more than it had been in 191 2, yet without any 
increase in taxation. 

This, then, should be England's attitude : a desire 
to understand as fully as may be the point of view 
of the Russians ; to enter as fully as possible into 
their hopes and aspirations. And if it seems difficult 
for us to cast ourselves back into the ages of faith 
and the days of the crusaders, with their contempt 
for death, we must remember that we have lost as 
well as gained by our longer experience and greater 
development. But perhaps the best thing Russia 



1 86 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

has to teach us is the truth of that fine French 
saying— a saying which no Brandenburger could 
accept : "Let me but make the songs of a people, 
I care not who makes their laws." 

The Russians have preserved right into the 
twentieth century much of the spiritual and social 
beauty of the age of faith ; they are still in many 
ways mediaeval, and the most absorbing question 
with respect to them is this : Can they transform 
the co-operative social ideas of the Middle Ages into 
effective twentieth-century organizations of similar 
type? Can they turn the Christian Syndicalism of 
the Middle Ages into the Industrial Syndicalism of 
these latter days without having to repeat all the 
blind gropings of the period of experimentation : the 
nineteenth-century empirical formulas of laissez-faire, 
individualism, the "dismal science," competitive 
capitalism, trades unionism, Socialism, and the general 
strike? If they can short-circuit their evolution by 
avoiding, or at any rate minimizing, these deviations, 
they will have done more for themselves and humanity 
than perhaps they realize, for they will have kept 
intact the communal spirit which we West Europeans 
with our more roundabout pioneering have lost and are 
now trying hard to recover. The remarkable power 
they have shown of self-reform in the matter of the 
vodka monopoly — which used to bring to the Govern- 
ment a quarter of its revenue — is a bright augury. 
A people which can petition its ruler to make Pro- 
hibition permanent after only a few weeks' experience 
of its benefits as a purely temporary measure is a 
people which can go both far and fast, and need not 
necessarily tread the painful path of experimental 
failure which has been the lot of its Western 
neighbours. 



FOURTH ESSAY 

ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 

I have now given my final twist to the kaleidoscope, 
and the familiar elements of the European situation 
are now in their last grouping : we are to look finally 
at the war from over the water, from the stand- 
point of our right little, tight little island. 

And a lucky thing it is for us that our country 
is an island, although there are obvious drawbacks 
to our good fortune. The sea protects us from 
invasion, but it also protects us from the invasion 
of ideas and of experiences that we ought not to 
miss. We live on an island, and so we have become 
insular. Our security is so great that we are apt 
to take it for granted, and to forget that even in 
our case also it is true that the strong man armed 
guards his house only until a stronger than he 
appears. Our mind is so given up to trade and 
commerce and material prosperity that we are apt 
to forget how unstable a basis that affords by itself 
for national greatness. 

And all the pomps of yesterday 
Are one with Nineveh and Tyre- 
Tyre, the great trading city of antiquity which left 
nothing by which we may remember her save a purple 
dye and the tradition that once she was very rich. 

As we shall see presently, we are not from time 

187 



1 88 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

immemorial a purely trading and manufacturing 
nation. Even when Napoleon called us a " nation 
of shopkeepers " we were less given over to money- 
making than we are to-day, and we were far better 
prepared to fight for our own cause than we are now, 
when our belief in the power of money has grown so 
great that it has made us rely on a hireling or mer- 
cenary army, whereas among our continental neigh- 
bours — and rivals— military service is a duty of 
citizenship. Carthage, the daughter of Tyre, fell 
because of her belief in the power of the purse to 
buy fighting men. Now I do not suggest that this 
fate is likely to overtake us. For, as I have already 
said, we are still, in spite of the corruption of four 
generations of industrialism and laissez-faire, by no 
means a purely money-grubbing people, and, for- 
tunately, our mercenaries are men of our own race, 
who do our fighting for other motives than merely the 
shilling a day we pay them. Yet the Germans, 
who regard killing as a stern and high State duty 
and not a matter of wage-earning, excuse themselves 
for occasional cruelty to English prisoners by calling 
them " mercenary pigs who get money for their dirty 
work," and Ulk makes an English soldier ask a 
French and a Belgian why they fight if they are 
not paid to do so. But of course the great thing — 
to our minds — is that we never use the word 
' mercenary " ; we use the word " professional " 
instead, and that makes all the difference in the 
world, and puts everything quite right. What 
possible objections can any one have to a professional 
army? ^ All professions are respectable, and thus 
we avoid a horrid term by burrowing our head 
ostrich-like into the depths of a new word, and what 
we no longer see no longer exists. 

The origin of our mercenary system ought, never- 
theless, to be understood. Nearly all our fighting 
has been overseas, and foreign service is a matter 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 189 

of furthering national policy rather than of national 
defence. Moreover, the Feudal vassals' service of 
forty days a year was so short as to be useless in 
foreign war ; hence the substitution of Scutage, or 
shield money, for actual service, and the hiring of 
soldiers who would fight as long as they were paid 
with the Scutage of the Feudal tenants. Thus arose 
the idea of the regular or professional soldier ; and 
to-day the Territorials have to volunteer specially for 
foreign service, so different is it from home defence, 
whereas abroad the one is simply an extension of 
the other — the Germans kept off a French invasion 
by holding a line in France itself, for example. 

The Ironsides of Cromwell — religious enthusiasts 
to a man though they were— were nevertheless hired 
professional soldiers ; and our present Army is the 
direct descendant of Cromwell's troops : the Cold- 
streams were originally one of Monk's regiments, 
which was kept together when the rest of the New 
Model Army was disbanded. 

Until the outbreak of war recruiting was always 
brisk when trade was bad and vice versa. Busy 
employers disliked the disturbance to work caused 
by Territorial organizations, and, in short, the drill- 
sergeant had to go into the labour market to hire 
fighting men. As a youth I often talked to these 
sergeants in Trafalgar Square, and learnt from them 
much of the prospects and pleasures of Army life 
but nothing of my duty to King and country. And 
that is and must be the normal line of argument : 
the man-killing trade has its attractions and com- 
pensations, as has also the ox-killing trade. If public 
opinion is beginning to recoil from that terrible 
mixture of warfare and business which we call 
Kruppism, it may also begin to feel uneasy about 
making the sternest duty of the citizen into a paid 
business. Kruppism lets down its alien enemy em- 
ployers, as witness the " disappointment " of Antwerp 



i go THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

by the German firm, which will ultimately have to 
choose which master it will really serve : Fatherland or 
Mammon. All armament firms are in this dilemma j 
and no State can rely safely on purchase either of 
men or material for self-protection. 

If Australia and New Zealand, Labour -governed 
colonies though they are, have turned from military 
professionalism to a system of universal service, it 
would be as well for us to investigate their reasons 
for the change— which leaves unchanged their fight- 
ing spirit. 

In that illuminating book " Seems So " it appears 
that our fishing population have a real feeling of 
duty towards naval service. Our continental neigh- 
bours, burdened as they are by the constant anxieties 
of their land frontiers and what is brewing beyond 
them, see us rather lazy, pleasure-loving, not in- 
clined to think too hard, undeveloped in all the 
higher activities of public life, caring but little for 
even our own mighty masterpieces of art and litera- 
ture (whereas English classics pile the German 
bookstalls — Tauchnitz and all our cheap series) ; they 
see us unable to appreciate and develop the best 
that is produced by the exceptional men now among 
us ; slack, indifferent for the most part to higher 
interests, but mighty keen on football, fishing, pigeon- 
flying, films, and reading John Ball, London Opinion, 
Chips, Tips, and the Funny Wonder ; and yet, withal, 
and in spite of our many-sided neglectfulness, so 
secure, so unworried, that those hard-working peoples 
across the North Sea whose national perils keep 
them in a state of such terrible all-round efficiency 
can hardly retain their resentment at the difference 
of their fate. With a great price they have bought 
security ; but we, lolling at ease right across the 
German trade routes, are free-born, and, like so many 
fortunates who enter this world with silver spoons 
in their mouths, are apt to be deficient in a sense of 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 191 

reality and to be ignorant and indeed careless of the 
way in which those who are born to toil and sorrow 
live. Even the little fact that our drivers keep to 
the left while all over the Continent drivers keep 
to the right must seem almost a piece of arrogance 
to the foreigner. Our ease and security have been 
assured us by one saving piece of common-sense, 
and yet of so obvious a nature that I hesitate to 
take credit even for that. We seized quite early 
upon the idea that the sea is our real frontier, and 
we worked out and applied this idea early enough 
in European history to reap the benefit of our policy 
in the windfall of outer regions which still remained 
to be appropriated. This lucky circumstance, com- 
bined with the fact that England lies in the centre 
of the world's land masses and therefore focuses 
their trade — London is the fulcrum of the world's 
money market — has given us both our Empire and 
our tremendous prosperity. Yet we must remember 
that we neither towed England into its present lati- 
tude and longitude nor did we throw stones into 
the sea till it emerged. No, " Britain at Heaven's 
command arose from out the azure main," and was 
given not only a charter, but a population, who 
have come, therefore, to regard themselves as God's 
Englishmen, so well looked after by Providence that 
there is no need for them to worry about anything 
whatsoever, since we too are a Chosen People. 

The idea of ruling the waves occurred to us quite 
early. In the fourteenth century, while the Middle 
Ages were still flourishing, Edward III married a 
Flemish or Belgian princess, Philippa of Hainault, 
and so drew the two countries together — and not 
even so far back as that for the first time. Nor 
was the tie a merely dynastic one : it was commercial 
also. The peace enjoyed by insular England — a 
kingdom already firmly united under one King — was 
so profound that the sheep, most helpless of animals 



1 92 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

in war-time, flourished here, and we exported raw 
wool as Australia does to-day. And we exported 
it to the West Riding of the Middle Ages, which 
happened to be Belgium. Now the currency system 
of those days was very defective, and so, to minimize 
disputes and facilitate trade, Edward III had the 
rose-noble struck for circulation in both countries, 
since, besides being King of England, he was also 
Marquis of Antwerp. On one side of this coin we 
see the King bearing the arms of England on his 
shield and standing in a ship. So, according to the 
rose-noble of about 1340, England was already 
ruling the waves. 

England's interest in Belgium was so keen in those 
days— Belgium bought up her wool— that she went 
to war on her behalf. France was threatening to 
attack Flanders, but an attack would have inter- 
rupted Flemish weaving, and so stopped our wool 
market ; hence the Hundred Years War, the glories 
of Crecy and Poictiers, Agincourt and Troyes. The 
French King was quite justified in calling Edward III 
the Wool Merchant, and to-day the most dignified 
seat in England after the thrones at Westminster 
and Canterbury is the Lord Chancellor's Woolsack 
in the House of Lords. Edward Ill's claim to the 
French Crown was merely a pretext to satisfy the 
scruples of the Flemings. They objected to fight- 
ing against the King of France. "Then I'll claim 
the French throne," said Edward III in effect, " so 
that in fighting for me you'll be fighting r for the King 
of France and against a usurper." 

It was by the expulsion of the English from France 
in the middle of the fifteenth century (just about 
the date of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks) 
that, as we have seen, a really united France arose— 
the creation of the miraculous Joan of Arc. And 
during the whole of the dark period which repre- 
sents our punishment for Henry V's wicked war of 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 193 

aggression, his cynical, short-sighted renewal of the 
Hundred Years War to switch his subjects' interest 
from home difficulties to foreign glories, and to stick 
his shaky house on the throne with the blood of the 
French — during the whole of the period succeeding 
his short success of Agincourt and the Troyes Treaty, 
the period, namely, of the Wars of the Roses, 
fought in the crashing dawn of the Middle Ages and 
the dawning light of the Renaissance, England's con- 
nexion with Belgium, Flanders, Burgundy — all three 
are one — was continued. John of Gaunt — " time- 
honoured Lancaster," as Shakespeare called him — 
was really John of Ghent, and was born in Ghent, 
while Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV, 
Richard III, and " false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence," 
and aunt to the princes murdered in the Tower, 
married our old friend Charles the Bold, Duke of 
Burgundy. And so we could continue, did time per- 
mit. But we must draw on our seven-league boots 
and take a stride across the centuries until we come 
to Good Queen Bess. 

Of course Elizabeth's reign to most people means 
the Armada. Now what were the facts about the 
Armada? Not Drake and his bowls, fine story 
though that is, and specially useful in these days 
when people are allowing the war to make an alto- 
gether excessive disturbance of their normal interests 
and activities. No, the facts are these : The Armada 
sailed for a week up-Channel with our volunteer 
Navy, stinted of ammunition and supplies, doing its 
best and cutting out stragglers now and then, but 
quite unable to check the stately passage of its foe. 
The Armada carried out its programme, anchored 
off Belgian shores, and prepared to take on board 
Parma's Spanish Army, now finished with its fight- 
ing in the Netherlands. There was no means in 
England's possession of preventing this vast array 
from carrying out its scheme to the letter, sailing, 

13 



i 9 4 THE WAR : ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

that is to say, up the gaping estuary of the Thames 
(always the weak point in our national defence), land- 
ing Parma's army near London, taking the capital, 
and establishing forthwith the Inquisition and all " the 
devildoms of Spain. " The danger came to us from 
the shores opposite our yawning Thames. Into that 
gaping orifice the Spaniards were going to drop 
a bitter pill indeed, and we had no means of either 
shutting our mouth or keeping off the Spaniards. 
So how did we save ourselves? By a mere ruse and 
the best luck in the world. We could not cripple 
the Spaniards, but we did manage to frighten them. 
Our eight fire-hulks, drifting at night before a 
freshening breeze, all ablaze, did what Howard of 
Effingham and all the sea-dogs of Elizabeth had 
been unable to do during the whole of the previous 
week : they managed to' break the Armada. But 
not by strength — by panic alone. The sudden blaze 
and the fear of those drifting furnaces unnerved 
the Spaniards ; they weighed anchor, cut cable, and 
drifted. " Then God blew upon them, and they were 
scattered," as Elizabeth's commemoration medal 
has it. And so England was saved ; but let us not 
imagine that England was therefore either bold or 
strong. Elizabeth was throughout her reign anxious 
to keep in with Spain. Drake, Raleigh, and the 
rest went on their piratical raids at their own risk ; 
the help Elizabeth gave to the Netherlanders against 
the Spaniards was as secret as she could make it. 
Sir Philip Sidney, Zutphen, the singeing of the 
Spanish King's beard, the defeat of the Armada 
itself, though brilliant features in history written after 
the event, must have been spoken of under the national 
breath almost with fear and trembling at the time 
of their occurrence. Even the triumph over the 
Armada must have come to the English with a shock 
of surprised relief. 

And James I was worse than Elizabeth. When 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER i 95 

Raleigh came back after an unsuccessful attack on 
Spanish El Dorado, James executed him to please 
the Spaniards. In his son's day England's posi- 
tion on the seas was still more humiliating, and 
the unfortunate business of Ship-money was a real 
and honest attempt on Charles I's part to make 
England safe at sea. Read the story of Lord 
Wimbledon's expedition to Cadiz. Think of the 
Algerine pirates — the ancestors of the French Turcos 
who are fighting so fiercely in the present war — 
ravaging the coasts of England and carrying off 
stout English peasants as slaves to Algiers. Yet 
such was the case, and so many were the victims 
that prayers were being continually offered up for 
their deliverance and collections taken for their 
ransom. Yet even in these depths of naval im- 
potence the Stuarts claimed that foreign ships meet- 
ing ours in the Channel should lower their main 
sail so as not to blanket our craft. 

But this hollow claim gave place to something 
more substantial when Cromwell found himself at 
the head of affairs. Though tried almost beyond 
human endurance by the difficulties of his impossible 
position as military dictator of England, he never- 
theless laid the first foundations of our naval power 
by his Navigation Act, This Act was aimed at 
the Dutch, who held in Cromwell's day the posi- 
tion we hold to-day — that, namely, of the world's 
carriers. The Dutch had developed their sea power 
early in their struggle with Spain in the fifteen hun- 
dreds, since it was only by sea that Spain could 
reach her Netherland possessions. Hence the rise 
of the Beggars as described in Motley's great book, 
and the subsequent sea power of Holland, with her 
widely extended colonies as a reward — in South 
Africa, in North America (" Rip Van Winkle " is an 
American, not a Dutch, story, remember), in South 
America (Dutch Guiana), in India, in the East Indies, 



1 96 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and so on. This little people were great at sea — 
their Dutch East India Company was the greatest 
corporation of the time ; and in those days we felt 
towards the Dutch much as the Germans feel in 
these days towards us. Hence all manner of con- 
temptuous terms in our language — " Dutch metal/' 
"Dutch courage," "Double Dutch," "You're a 
Dutchman." 

In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch 
Is in giving too little and asking too much. 

Nowadays, of course, when Holland has ceased to 
be our rival, and become simply a State with a past 
and a number of picturesque old towns, our feelings 
have altered, and " my dear old Dutch " has become 
a music-hall costermonger's term of endearment. 
But in the days of Cromwell the Dutch were terrible 
people. They had succeeded to the sea power of 
their ancient foes, the Spaniards, and it needed 
courage in Cromwell to defy them. Yet the challenge 
was thrown down : the Navigation Act was passed, 
and the struggle began. 

Now the policy of the Navigation Act was to 
prevent any goods from entering England unless 
they came in the ships either of the country pro- 
ducing the goods or else in English bottoms — i.e. 
the Dutch carriers were ruled out of all but the direct 
Dutch-English trade. The immediate effect of this 
Act was, of course, a considerable scarcity of im- 
ported articles, since the usual carriers had been 
warned off. But this scarcity was intentional and 
expected ; it was, in fact, the very lever that Crom- 
well had determined to use for the forcing on of 
our English fleet, and his policy succeeded. The 
demand for English shipping to replace the Dutch 
grew so urgent that before long English ships were 
sailing every sea and the Dutch had been ousted. 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 197 

As, moreover, merchant shipping grew naval power 
had to be increased — a relatively easy business in 
these days, when every ship was armed for self- 
defence, or, if circumstances warranted, for attack. 
But the Dutch did not let the Navigation Act pass 
unchallenged, and we come, therefore, on a series 
of fights which continue beyond Cromwell's time into 
the reign of Charles II. "The Admiral's Broom," a 
fine song, tells a tale of the fights of those days 
between van Tromp and Blake : how van Tromp 
hoisted a broom to the masthead of his ship as 
a sign that he meant to sweep the English off the 
face of the seas ; and how Blake replied with a 
whip, which, in the form of a pennant or streamer, 
is still to be found on every King's ship while in 
commission. 

Cromwell had his reward. He was able at last 
to challenge the power of Spain — the first English 
ruler to do so, in spite of the defeat of the Armada 
sixty years earlier. Cromwell's sailors, Penn and 
Venables, seized the Spanish island of Jamaica, which 
thus appears as the first on our list of conquered 
overseas possessions. England's power abroad, by 
reason of her Navy, was also sufficient to enable 
Milton, Cromwell's Latin or Foreign Secretary, to 
intervene with effect in European politics, as, for 
instance, when Mazarin was persuaded to protect 
the Protestant Waldenses or Vaudois of Piedmont, 
on the border between France and Italy, from their 
lord, the Duke of Savoy. The sonnet of Milton 
beginning 

Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie whitening on the Alpine mountains cold, 

is one of the finest dispatches of an English Foreign 
Secretary that we possess, although it brings the 
Deity into our affairs in quite a Kaiser-like style. 



198 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

Many people are apt to contrast the Protectorate 
with the Restoration to the disadvantage of 
Charles II ; and in many ways the contrast needs 
no emphasis — it is great enough in itself. 

But as regards sea matters there is more continuity 
than one might expect. Charles II was interested 
in the Navy ; and we may easily see in the diary 
of Pepys, Secretary to the Navy in Charles' day, 
that there was more conscientious work put into 
the upkeep of the Navy than one expects to find 
in the affairs of the Merry Monarch. It is true 
that the Dutch sailed up the Medway, thus once more 
emphasizing the weakness of our Thames estuary 
and especially the danger which threatens when the 
Netherlands are in the hands of a real Power. It is, 
unfortunately, also true that the Dutch ships con- 
tained English sailors, who shouted to their former 
companions on board the English vessels, " We used 
to fight for paper : now we fight for dollars " — words 
which suggest that if we do rely on mercenaries it 
is just as well to pay them in coin rather than in 
I.O.U.'s (a favourite currency with the Stuarts). 
Nevertheless it is easy to give too much importance 
to this raid — for it was nothing more. On the other 
hand, it must be borne in mind that the Dutch 
lost to the English in Charles IPs reign the valu- 
able American port of New Amsterdam, which the 
English renamed New York after the King's brother, 
James, Duke of York, at that time an admiral, and 
later, of course, King James II. Other American 
colonies were added to our overseas possessions 
before Charles begged his courtiers to pardon him 
for being M so unconscionable a time in dying," 
namely Carolina, so called after Charles, and Penn- 
sylvania, granted to the Quaker son of the con- 
queror of Jamaica. 

But the rivalry of Holland ceases with the union 
of England and Holland under William of Orange 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 199 

— the ideal King of Macaulay and the Orange Lodges 
of Belfast — and a longer-continued rivalry takes its 
place. This is the rivalry with France. In deal- 
ing with Louis XIV I mentioned that the chief reason 
why William III came to the throne was to get the 
help of England for the protection of Holland against 
the great French king, and that if William was spared 
from dying in the last ditch — as a matter of fact 
he died at Hampton Court after a fall from his 
horse, which had stumbled over a mole-hill (the 
Jacobites toasted " the little gentleman in the velvet 
coat " long after) — if William was spared that 
damp death, it was because he managed to secure 
England's help in driving France out of the 
Netherlands. 

Thus we see how often already we have fought 
on the Continent for the sake of keeping powerful 
States like Spain and France out of the Netherlands, 
and how, when Holland herself was powerful — but 
not for long — we had to fight her also. 

We come now to the great war with France, which 
begins with William III and ends with Waterloo, 
a veritable second Hundred Years War, for, although 
we were not fighting every year of the century and 
more, yet the w r ars followed each other so fast that 
to all intents and purposes it is a century of fight- 
ing, with breathing spaces in between the rounds. 

I have suggested by the use of that word 
" rounds " that this war was in the nature of a 
prize-fight. And so it was, for two reasons. There 
was a prize, and there was training for the contest. 
Leaving the prize to be considered later, let us look 
now into the nature of England's training. This 
training was a regular system, and had a name. 
It was known as the Mercantile System ; and the 
idea underlying the whole scheme was the same as 
that underlying the preparation of a boxer — a careful 
building-up of the forces by the regulation of every 



2oo THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

side of the life. England, in short, went into train- 
ing, and a training which had of necessity many of 
the Spartan features of our athlete's regime. Just 
as the individual is obliged to give up his luxuries, 
his cigarettes, his tea, and so forth, so was the 
nation called upon to sacrifice many of the pleasant 
things of life. In the words of Dr. Cunningham, 
England had to sacrifice Plenty for the sake of 
Power, and she made the sacrifice as willingly as 
Germany is making it to-day— the only point of 
difference in this respect between the England and 
the Germany of to-day being this, that the power 
England ^ developed in the eighteenth century was 
so effective and her triumph so decisive in conse- 
quence that she has been saved from the necessity 
of keeping herself in training ever since, whereas 
Germany has never gone out of training, and could 
not even if she wanted to, since soldiering is the 
foundation of her existence. " Nothing succeeds like 
success ' is in many ways a very misleading pro- 
verb ; and the difficulty England is now experiencing 
in getting herself again into fighting trim after a 
century of ease is the other side of the proverb— 
the penalty of success. 

Let us see, then, what the eighteenth century war- 
training of England consisted in. In the first place 
it was thorough and all-round, and reminds us some- 
what of Germany's reorganization after Napoleon, 
with less emphasis on the educational and more on 
the material aspects of national strength. 

The strengthening of the Navy was a chief point 
of the policy. Already Elizabeth had seen the neces- 
sity for keeping up the supply of the fishermen from 
whom the fighting sailors are drawn when she issued 
her political Lent proclamation— an ordinance which 
commanded the eating of fish in Lent and on Fridays, 
not because the eating of fish had any religious 
significance to Protestant Englishmen, but simply 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 201 

because English fishermen must be kept employed in 
sufficient numbers to recruit the Navy. Similarly 
the timber needed for the " Hearts of Oak M was a 
matter of national concern, and landowners who 
possessed oak-trees on their estates had to remember 
that they held them, as it were, in trust for the 
nation, that any chopping down of even their own 
oaks for beams, or panelling, or furniture, or even 
choir-stalls or Yule-logs meant a possible weakening 
of the English Navy at a later date. Collingwood, 
Nelson's fellow-commander, used to go about with 
a pocketful of acorns and a sharp walking-stick, 
and wherever he thought he saw a good opportunity 
for sowing an oak he ran his stick into the soil 
and dropped an acorn into the hole. Similarly, 
farmers had to sow a certain breadth of land with 
the hemp, jute, flax and other crops required for 
sails and cordage, while warlike substances of foreign 
origin, like saltpetre, were brought in by favouring 
commercial treaties . 

But men as well as material were required ; and 
men need not only work — Elizabeth had provided 
for that in her Poor Law measures as well as in 
her Lent ordinance — but also food. And to secure 
that food should never fail in England, even in time 
of war, agriculture was encouraged by every means 
in the power of the Government, and particularly 
by the payment of bounties on corn. This part 
of the Mercantile System, together with the general 
supervision of the national stamina and physique 
which it implied, forms, as we have already seen, 
one of the chief features of modern Germany. 

We have now dealt with Material and Men. A 
third " M " remains, however, and this is Money. Now 
war cannot be fought on anything less solid than 
gold. It has occurred to the Germans to give up 
their wedding-rings and receive in exchange iron 
ones — stamped Wi II — simply because gold is so 



202 THE WAR : ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

precious to a State in time of war, as without it 
foreign payments become an impossibility. 

To secure a great store of the gold a Government 
preparing for war so much believes in, all manner 
of curious measures were adopted by England. 
Trade was encouraged, for instance, with those States 
which wanted what we produced, but which produced 
articles which we could do without, either through 
national self-denial or national habit, or else because 
we produced them ourselves. The unfortunate coun- 
try upon whom we unloaded our goods was thus 
unable to hand over her own products in return, 
and had, accordingly, to pay us in hard cash. 

We got together a great deal of bullion by these 
and other means, and it was the gold of Pitt and of 
" perfidious Albion " which was the outstanding 
feature of the later years of this great war. 

During the whole of this period the idea of trading 
with the enemy was so abhorrent to the patriotic 
English that it affected even their drinking habits : 
and can patriotism score a higher triumph than that? 
No English gentleman would allow champagne, bur- 
gundy, or cognac on his dinner-table— unless he were 
a recognized eccentric like Fox — but felt in honour 
bound to drink himself and his friends into gout 
for the benefit of our allies, the Portuguese, against 
our " natural enemy " — for such they were for the 
greater part of the century in English eyes— the 
French. 

Thus England aimed patriotically and self-sacri- 
ficingly to make herself strong in war, and soon 
she began to score points in her contest with France. 

Round 2 was finished by 1 7 1 3 ; and England 
gained by it some valuable trade concessions as well 
as Gibraltar and several portions of North America. 
She could send one ship a year to Panama (and 
that ship served as a sort of landing-stage through 
which the cargoes of the many ships which accom- 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 203 

panied her were passed and thus covered by the 
Treaty), and she had a slave monopoly. The wealth 
she drew from her South American trade was great, 
and the English grew as keen for more of it as a 
tiger which has tasted blood. Thus we come to the 
era of frenzied finance, of eighteenth-century com- 
pany-promoting, of 'Change Alley and the South Sea 
Bubble — the South Sea being, of course, the Spanish 
Main or South Atlantic. Then, too, there was 
the curious Jenkins' Ear War. Jenkins was a 
smuggler — Free Trader he called himself — and his 
risky business consisted in trading on South American 
coasts other than that of Panama. When at last 
the Spaniards caught him they cut off his ear. 
Promptly Jenkins, who must have had a keen eye 
for effect, put his ear into a box, saying as he did 
so that he commended his soul to his God (apparently 
he feared that more than his ear was going to be 
cut off) and his cause to his country, and sailed for 
England. Thereupon Round 3 began. 

But I do not propose to go through the match 
round by round. All I need say to finish off this 
commercial aspect of the war is that the two leading 
spirits in the struggle, both the elder Pitt (Chatham) 
and his second son, the younger Pitt, who fought 
Napoleon, were members of a family whose fortunes 
had been laid in commerce, and who represented 
throughout this period the rising commercial interest 
in England, as opposed to the old territorial Whig 
oligarchy, which had ruled ever since James II had 
been driven back again to Louis XIV. Inasmuch as 
the new party opposed the Whigs they were Tories, 
but the new Tories were very different from the old 
Jacobite Tories of the '15 and '45. The new were 
commercial and prepared to fight for commerce. The 
old were forlorn supporters of a lost cause, pathetic 
and futile. The spirit of old Governor Pitt, who 
carried on a risky business along the Indian coast 



2o 4 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

and came to England with the famous Pitt diamond 
hidden in a hollow in his boot-heel, inspired 
both his descendants and the party they led. 
From that day trade and commerce have not only 
been increasingly influential but also increasingly 
recognized in our Government, whereas in Germany 
the commercial man has still no recognized social 
or political status, however strong his indirect in- 
fluence on affairs may be. Germany is still under 
the equivalent of our eighteenth-century Whig 
oligarchy. 

In this lengthened struggle with France, England 
had a great advantage. Whereas France had land 
frontiers, with all their complications and anxieties, 
to worry her, England could concentrate on her one 
and only problem, the problem which Cromwell had 
been the first to tackle with effect, the problem of 
sea power (another instance of England's luck in 
being insular). Thus it was possible for England 
to keep France busy in Europe by helping her 
European enemies, and in this way to lessen the 
energy she could put into her Navy. Chatham 
showed real insight when he said that he would win 
an overseas Empire on the battlefields of Europe — 
just as Germany hopes to do to-day as a matter of 
fact. But whatever diversion we might create on 
the mainland, our real business was at sea. England's 
one safeguard lay, as it still lies, in her Navy ; and 
in seeking first national security she found something 
else added unto her, namely, an Empire, and for this 
reason : — 

To be really safe England must have a supremely 
powerful Navy — a Navy so strong that in time of 
war it is bound to win. Now when it has beaten 
hostile fleets, what is the consequence? This : that 
all the overseas possessions of the defeated State fall 
helpless prizes to the victor, for the simple reason 
that the Mother Country, having lost the security of 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 205 

sea transit for her troops, cannot come to their 
assistance. 

In China there is, I believe, an elaboration of the 
pastime of kite-flying which illustrates my point. 
Each kite-flier tries to get a hooked knife in the tail 
of his kite under the string of his rival's kite, and 
thus, sooner or later, bring the other kite to the 
ground. Now this was the game being played right 
throughout the eighteenth century. Each of the five 
West European nations — England, France, Spain, 
Portugal, and Holland — were flying colonies as kites 
with navy lines stretched across the various oceans, 
and since it was a matter of life or death for 
England to be stronger than any of the rest at sea — 
otherwise she could never have remained England 
at all — she was bound sooner or later to cut most of 
the rival connections and pick up the pieces for 
herself. The very names of our colonies tell us 
that ; we have already seen New Amsterdam become 
New York, but Quebec, Montreal, and Acadie — 
all obviously French — became ours through Wolfe 
(it was interesting to hear French-Canadian soldiers 
talking French in London to the Belgians) ; Tas- 
mania, New Zealand, the Transvaal, Orange Free 
State — all obviously Dutch in origin — fell to us ; Goa, 
Trinidad, Natal, and others were obviously Spanish 
or Portuguese before they became ours — a finely 
mixed Empire for " that heterogeneous thing an 
Englishman/' as Defoe calls him, to rule. The prin- 
ciples of hydrostatics would seem to apply even to 
sea power. Once we had established an effective 
pressure in one area, that pressure was felt with equal 
force throughout the whole water surface available. 
Thus at the present time the pressure of our concen- 
tration in the North Sea is felt very much beyond the 
area of the German Ocean — to give it its Teutonic 
name. • ! 

Particularly clear is the effect of sea-power in the 



2o6 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

later stages of this century-long struggle, the fight 
against Napoleon. 

There is little doubt that Napoleon at the outset 
of his career dreamt of nothing less than the establish- 
ment of the world Empire which France had lost in 
the days before the Revolution. His earlier ventures 
were all out in the Levant, in Syria and in Egypt ; 
one of his earliest victories is the Battle of the 
Pyramids, for instance, and a Mohammedan servant 
attended him through his after-career. He also kept 
in touch with the Indian princes who were giving 
England trouble in the East. But Nelson's victory 
of the Nile quite stopped any idea he may have had 
of establishing an Oriental Empire. Indeed, even 
when he found himself thus restricted to the com- 
paratively narrow field of Europe he still found that 
England blocked his way. She was the centre and 
paymaster of coalition after coalition. The English 
paid the foreigner to fight the French ; they would 
not fight themselves, except on sea. The gold of 
Pitt was his great enemy, so he determined on the 
invasion of England. 

If on a clear day as one walks the Leas of Folke- 
stone one looks across at the opposite coast of France, 
one may be able just to distinguish through glasses 
the shaft of a column on the cliffs above Boulogne. 
This is the column which marks the gathering to- 
gether of the army of England, an army which was 
practised in rapid embarking and disembarking in 
flat-bottomed boats, and was intended to march on 
the capital from the coast of Kent. So confident 
was Napoleon of success that the medal he struck in 
anticipation of victory — a giant strangling a Triton — 
bore these words : " Frappe a Londres." All these 
preparations, made openly within sight of our shores, 
raised our anger against Napoleon to fever heat, and 
our anger against " Kaiser Bill " is as nothing, if we 
may judge by the cartoons and caricatures of the 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 207 

time, compared with our anger against the Corsican 
ogre. We put up those Cheshire-cheese-like Martello 
towers, which can still be seen dotting our south- 
eastern coast for miles (and which can now be hired 
for a very small sum from the War Office), and we 
cut a military canal along Romney Marsh from 
Hythe onwards, to stop any party which managed to 
get across the Channel. But our real defence then 
lay, as it does to-day, not in tower and ditch, but 
in our Navy, which in those days was playing the 
long, weary, watchful game which must ever be 
the part of a master-fleet in a naval war. Until 
Napoleon could secure the protection of the French 
and Spanish Navies, his proposed trip across the 
Channel was impossible. Qnce he could secure the 
command of the Channel, his way across would be as 
easy as it was for our force to reach Boulogne ( I ) in 
August 19 14. But his fleet was shut up in the French 
and Spanish ports by Nelson's blockading fleets, and 
when, in obedience to Napoleon's imperative orders, 
they issued forth, they came out only for defeat and 
destruction at Trafalgar. 

M At Trafalgar we fought for existence, at Water- 
loo only for victory," is a saying that contains much 
truth. The final loss of sea-power in 1805 quite 
destroyed Napoleon's hopes of a world Empire, and 
even made his position in Europe untenable in the 
long run, as we shall shortly see. Although the army 
he had gathered against England gave him the crown- 
ing victory of Austerlitz when moved against Austria, 
and although the dying Pitt said, " Roll up the map 
of Europe, it won't be wanted these twenty years," 
nevertheless the year 1805 saw a still vaster map 
rolled up by England before the eyes of France, and 
that was the map of the world. 

In 1905 was held the St. Louis Exhibition. Now 
the real name of that big show was the Centenary 
of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, and thus we 



2o8 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

are carried back again to 1805. And to what pur- 
pose? Simply to see Napoleon, unable any longer 
to get across the Atlantic for the protection of the 
remaining French possessions along the Mississippi 
from New Orleans to St. Louis (French names both), 
selling them to the United States and thus opening 
to the new Republic the door of the West and the 
way to the Pacific. England had thus cut the French 
colonial kite- string ; and Louisiana fluttered down 
into the hands, not of England but of her ex-colony 
the United States of America. 

But sea power can not only hamstring, as it were, 
rival Empires, it can also put tremendous pressure on 
areas far beyond the range of the guns of the fleets 
which are its instruments. 

Foiled in his direct attack on England, Napoleon 
conceived the desperate idea of ruining us by a trade 
boycott. The obvious way to bring low a mere 
nation of shopkeepers was to exclude their goods 
from European markets. This Napoleon attempted 
to carry out by issuing a couple of Decrees, one, 
significantly enough, from conquered Berlin, the other 
from conquered Milan. But it is easier to order the 
exclusion of goods than to enforce the order ; and 
the ^ smuggling trade of England, chiefly through 
Heligoland, which we had taken in 1807, was 
enormous. 

The Empress always had English stuffs in her 
wardrobes, and people said that even the French 
soldiers marched on English leather, so difficult and 
complex is the subject of contraband of war and 
trade in war-time. War is as likely now as then to 
stimulate English trade as to injure it. 

But however ineffective Napoleon's decrees may 
have been, there was no doubt about the effective- 
ness of England's reply to them. This took the 
form of Orders in Council, instituting a blockade 
of European ports, and since England had the 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 209 

supremacy at sea she was able to make this blockade 
effective. The results soon began to appear. Prices 
rose, and the various peoples who had at first looked 
upon the French as liberators and saviours from their 
own local tyrannies now began to regard the French 
in their turn as oppressors and tyrants, who were 
raising prices and making life unbearable. Thus 
is to be seen the beginning of popular movements 
against the French, and we ourselves helped on more 
particularly the popular movement in Spain. We 
sent Wellington out and fought the Peninsular War, 
which, in spite of the smallness of our numbers and 
the uncertainty of the support we received from the 
Spaniards and the Portuguese, proved in the long 
run the Achilles' heel of Napoleon's Empire, the 
back-door as it were to France (as Louis XIV also 
had seen Spain to be), through which enemies could 
creep while she was busy fighting across and along 
the Rhine ; the Ireland, or South Africa — according 
to German hopes — of Napoleon's French Empire. 

While England was thus preparing to stab France 
from behind, Russia was growing restive under the 
pressure of the English blockade, and at last opened 
her ports again to English goods. Nobody was more 
popular in those days among us in England than 
the Czar. Such a breach in his plans, such defiance of 
his authority, was too serious a matter for Napoleon 
to ignore, and therefore he set about the impossible 
task of conquering Russia. Thus it was English 
sea power which, by creating, through blockade, a 
scarcity in Europe that Russia resented, drove Napo- 
leon to his fate, which brought him up against 
those terrible fighters General January and General 
February when he had been burnt out of Moscow and 
had verst upon verst of snow to tramp through, with a 
hostile Germany waiting for him over the border at 
Leipsic. 

We wonder how many English people who have 

14 



2xo THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

listened to the great Russian "1812 M Symphony have 
realized why it was called " 1812/' and what our 
exact share in it is. How many may have thought that 
the numbers refer simply to the metre or rhythm in 
which it was written, some sort of extended 3 : 2 time, 
namely 18 : 12! 

But whatever the defects — until the present war 
began to teach us — in our knowledge of 18 12, most 
of us know something of 181 5, for that is Waterloo 
year. 

Now Waterloo was fought in Belgium, and thus 
we find English troops once more on Belgian soil, 
as they have been at least once a century ever since 
the days of Queen Elizabeth, to go no farther back 
than that, though of course we easily could. And 
our reason for our continued interest in Belgium is 
indeed one with the maintenance of our sea power. 
Although our very earliest relations with Belgium 
were chiefly trading, yet even in Edward Ill's day, 
as the rose-noble shows us, the idea of sea 
power had begun to take root in our minds and to 
link itself with Flanders, for those flat coasts opposite 
the gaping estuary of the Thames, once they have 
fallen into the hands of a powerful State, threaten 
the very heart of our land at its most vulnerable 
point. And thus again and again have we had to 
step in to free or help to free those coasts from the 
powerful foreigner. We have seen Elizabeth send 
help to the Dutch, who actually flooded their country 
against Spain under William the Silent ; we have 
seen the Dutch themselves the powerful enemy whom 
we had to engage in the days of Cromwell and 
Charles II ; again we saw William III bring in 
the power of England to keep the mightiest State of 
his time, the France of Louis XIV, out of the Nether- 
lands, even though he had to die in the last ditch. 
(King Albert of Belgium has heroically paralleled 
his determination during the present war.) And 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 211 

now we have seen England joining in the fight against 
France, led by Napoleon, because the French Revo- 
lution, Napoleon's motive-power, had boiled over 
into Belgium. Can we wonder, then, that when a 
new Power threatens Belgium to-day England pur- 
sues without hesitation her traditional policy? We 
have always guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium, 
we have fought for it again and again. 

Belgium has thus been for centuries the cockpit 
of Europe. 

But Pitt was just as reluctant to attack France as 
Mr. Asquith was reluctant to attack Germany. Pitt 
welcomed the French Revolution, not so much per- 
haps because he approved of its principles — he left 
that to Fox — as because it kept France busy with 
her own affairs and so left him free to do the one 
piece of work which most urgently needed doing in 
England at the time, and that was to organize the 
Industrial Revolution. Pitt fully expected, I believe, 
to devote his energies to internal reform, to guiding 
the great change which was coming over the land, 
just as during the past few years the statesmen of 
the present generation have been engaged in a belated 
attempt to patch up all the evil which that change 
has caused. If the French Revolution had not 
worked its way into the Netherlands and established 
itself there as the Batavian Republic, Cobbett would 
probably never have had an excuse for calling English 
manufacturing towns " hell-holes/ ' and foreigners 
would not now be able to wonder at the poorness 
of our public life and the wealth of false teeth in 
our shop -windows. But since the great cauldron 
of the Revolution could not be kept within the borders 
of France, there was nothing for it but once more 
wearily to shoulder the burden of wan and bear it 
through to the bitter end in 181 5. 

Having sent Napoleon to our island of St. Helena, 
Europe could afford to rest and indulge in a certain 



2i2 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

amount of reaction. England also was now as free 
as she could ever wish to be to indulge in her 
favourite pastime of money-making. There would be 
no need of soldiers or martial qualities for many 
a long day — if ever again. And so we all turned to 
our Tom-Tiddler's Ground and picked up gold and 
silver as fast as ever we could for the rest of the cen- 
tury, and,, with a few vague misgivings that there might 
possibly be other sides to the national life, into the 
twentieth century also. I have already shown what 
a fearful mess England got into during this money- 
scramble, how all her traditions, all her old life, with 
its arts and amenities, disappeared, hoofed into the 
mud by the greed of gain which was then rampant, 
and how we are now emerging from the mud-heap, 
smirched, degraded, ignorant of our past, indifferent 
through whole areas of our land to the essentials of 
a civilized life — and yet withal (so blessed have we 
been by Nature) with our native powers not vitally 
impaired, and our determination, once it is en- 
lightened, as this war will enlighten it, sufficiently 
tenacious to replace us on the great high-road which 
runs beside the trampled mud-heap, and to carry 
us along by forced marches till we are abreast of 
our Allies the French and the Russians in the things 
that really matter : we are now ahead of them in 
realized wealth, that is all. 

But during this century of money-making England 
was by no means as deaf to the sorrows of struggling 
nationalities abroad as she was to the sorrows of 
struggling workpeople at home, where her ears were 
assailed with the wicked nonsense of laissez-faire 
economics and politics. Again and again during 
the nineteenth century England played the part of 
champion of oppressed peoples. Garibaldi was re- 
ceived with shouts in the streets of London, and 
indeed Palmerston was so busy recognizing new 
Governments all over the Continent, practically on 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 213 

his own responsibility, that Queen Victoria and her 
German husband, Albert, who may be seen sitting 
in gold any day in Kensington Gardens, protested, 
since so many of their friends and relations were 
losing their crowns during the revolutionary period 
of 1848 with England's connivance and even en- 
couragement. Gladstone continued this tradition, and 
Punch represented him once as a terrier looking up 
very fiercely at the word " Armenia. " "Who said 
atrocities? " was the legend of the cartoon. Once 
when reading in the Gladstone library at Hawarden 
I came across a sumptuous edition of Blake that had 
been presented to Gladstone by the Armenians he 
had protected from the Turks, much as Milton had 
protected the Vaudois from the Duke of Savoy. It 
is shameful that in 1864 we did not protect Denmark 
from Prussia as we had undertaken to do in conjunc- 
tion with France and Russia, and thus keep Prussia 
out of Schleswig-Holstein and its North Sea coast. 
The Naval Race with Germany was our punishment. 

More recently England has been quieter in con- 
tinental affairs. During the equilibrium of the 
Double and Triple Alliances England occupied a 
position of splendid isolation, to quote Lord Salis- 
bury, a policy which, however, did not save her 
from the distrust and dislike of the continental 
Powers, who, fully armed, were watching each other 
day and night over their borders. 

This policy of keeping ourselves to ourselves proved 
untenable, however, as the balance on the Continent 
began to shift. We realized this during the Boer 
War, when all Lord Salisbury's efforts were needed 
to prevent a European coalition from forming against 
us. The Kaiser's telegram to Kruger also reminded 
us forcibly of the world ambitions of Germany, as 
well as of her envy and hatred of ourselves, and her 
ever-growing fleet caused us to revise our position. 
We became the Allies of Japan in 1902, and thus, 



2i 4 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

having freed our Navy of some of its work in the 
Pacific, we were able to concentrate more forces in 
home waters. Later we thought even of leaving 
the Mediterranean for the same purpose, since we 
had fixed up our differences with France, and the 
French Navy was the strongest in the inland sea. 
Thus we were slowly, and, I think, reluctantly, veer- 
ing away from our position of balancer in Europe 
to our present position in the Triple Entente ; and 
when we made an agreement with Russia similar to 
that we had made with France shortly after Fashoda, 
the new position was finally adopted. Russia acknow- 
ledged that our warnings as regards Japan showed 
our real friendliness to her, whereas Germany had 
egged her on to defeat, if not disaster, and so she 
came into the Entente, which already included her 
ally France. Bismarck's wise policy of friendship 
with Russia broke down when the present Kaiser 
failed to renew the " Reinsurance " treaty ; and 
though the object of this new combination was in 
no sense to isolate Germany in Europe, as Germany 
protested continually that it was, yet we have to 
recognize that the effect of it was to harden and 
embitter Germany's fighting temper — if that were pos- 
sible — by making her feel, rightly or wrongly, that 
she was shut in not only east and west by Russia 
and France, but overseas by England as well. Never- 
theless England had no choice in the matter, since 
the policy of Germany had fundamentally altered 
since 1888. The undoubted European leadership 
which had satisfied Bismarck, and which rested on a 
good understanding with Russia, was ousted by the 
Kaiser's dreams of world empire : " The trident must 
be in our fist." So direct a challenge to the naval 
supremacy which is as essential to our safety as is 
the German Army on its frontiers to the safety of 
Germany could not be ignored, and England began 
to watch the German Navy. Moreover, any attempt 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 215 

at a European dictatorship, leading, as Napoleon had 
originally intended, to a world dictatorship, must bring 
England into opposition, and therefore we pledged 
France, who under her arrangement with us had con- 
centrated her fleet in the Mediterranean, the protec- 
tion of our Navy against attacks by the German 
ships upon French Atlantic ports even before that 
other question, so vital to our own safety, of the 
German seizure of Belgium was agitated. We are 
always against a would-be monopolist, whether he 
be a Spanish Philip II, a French Louis XIV, a French 
Napoleon I, or a German William II. 

In the 1870 war we were saved from intervention 
by the fact that both Germany and France avoided 
Belgium altogether, but the invasion in August 19 14 
was as serious a menace to us as the Russian pene- 
tration of Korea was to Japan. The interest of an 
island State in the continental coast just opposite 
it is supreme, and unfortunately both Germany's 
history and also the professed intentions of her 
responsible spokesmen were such as to compel us 
to resist even the mere passage of her troops through 
the State whose effective neutrality has been one of 
the most constant points in our foreign policy for 
centuries. Even if we had had no Entente with the 
Power she was moving against, and no interest in 
preventing the establishment of a European mono- 
poly of power, still, for the protection of our own 
coasts and the maintenance of our own first line of 
defence, sea power, we should have been obliged 
to fight the moment Germany crossed the Belgian 
frontier. Antwerp might just as easily prove " a 
pistol held at the head of England M in the hand of 
William II as in that of Napoleon. 

Perhaps it is not so clearly realized as it should 
be why Germany chose this perilous path — a path 
which was bound to cost her dear and is costing 
her much dearer than she expected. Since 1870 



216 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

the French fortresses along the German frontier 
between Luxemburg and Switzerland have been so 
strengthened that the breaking of an army through 
them would be a very lengthy and terrible business. 
Rather than attempt it, Germany preferred to get 
round one end if possible. Hence, it may be, the 
Kaiser's recent visit to Switzerland, which is, of 
course, partly German in population ; hence, cer- 
tainly, the attack on Belgium in August 191 4. Our 
Berlin Ambassador's report of August 8, 19 14, in 
the Government's Penny Blue Book, page 78, puts 
the^ matter quite clearly. England was therefore 
obliged to follow her traditional line. Rejecting 
the clumsy attempt of Germany to bribe her first 
to desert France, then to allow the penetration of 
Belgium, she necessarily incurred the renewed hatred 
of Germany for having disturbed German plans and 
having refused to wait her turn at the chopping- 
block whereon the Teuton was to dismember all 
his enemies : ' Dilly, Dilly, come and be killed ! " 
as he says to the Strasburg goose before he takes 
out her liver for pate de foie gras. It was evidently 
" time for us to go " once more to the relief of 
Belgium, as we had done so often before at about 
the turn of the century. 

When I had finished the facts about Germany, 
France, and Russia, I indulged in a little generalizing 
— perhaps even moralizing. Now, if I follow the 
same line where England is concerned, what can I 
say? Little, unfortunately, about our great belief 
in thought or love of art, little about our popular 
appreciation of our own best work, and what little 
there is to be said had perhaps better come last of 
all. But there are certain practical and material 
consequences of sea power which stand out so clearly 
as to be unavoidable. 

In the first place, sea power means freedom from 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 217 

invasion. We are the only combatant who has been 
spared the horrors of an oncoming army, we and 
our Eastern counterpart, the Japanese. Our only 
hint of an invasion was in the darkening of London. 
And that was pure gain. For the first time in my 
life I saw the stars in Fleet Street ; London, as one 
walked about it at night, was a city of mystery and 
a strange beauty that made it almost unrecognizable. 
One could again recapture the beauty of the 
Thames shot-towers that so appealed to the French 
impressionist, because they no longer cheered up the 
home-going workers on the trams with thoughts of 
tea and whisky. The Processional Avenue along 
the Mall was for the first time a tribute to Royalty, 
and not to the more brilliant glories of Virox or 
whatever it is at the other end. But whether the 
Londoner preferred all this to the glare of Piccadilly 
Circus is another matter. 

Again, sea power means business as usual. Our 
food comes to us uninterruptedly over the sea at the 
rate of £500 a minute, and sells at ordinary rates. 
We alone among the fighters are pursuing our normal 
course, and pursuing it so steadily that the war is 
apt to become to us nothing more than muffled 
boomings across the water and staring headlines in 
the papers. But so long as it does not blind us to 
the realities of the war, this immunity is valuable. 
Mr. Lloyd George said that our enemies could find 
the first hundred millions as easily as we — but not the 
last ; and that because, I suppose, we are enjoying 
much, probably most, of our normal trade income, 
whereas the continental combatants are fighting upon 
accumulations ; resources which their vast armies are 
drinking up at an unheard-of rate per second. But 
we must keep ourselves from regarding finance as 
a substitute for men ; we must avoid the false analogy 
which leads some people to speak of our bills of 
exchange as a sort of artillery outranging that of 



3i8 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

the other side, and the " sinews of war " as the 
equivalent of soldiers. 

Again, behind the shield of our Navy, we can 
develop increasing military forces, whereas the 
continental Powers are compelled to put their whole 
strength into the field at once. The result is that 
while at the beginning of the war the British were 
only a tough knot in a long French line, yet as 
time goes on the size of the British Army will increase 
much more rapidly than will that of any other Power, 
and therefore, as the war proceeds, our influence 
will increase relatively, and the increase will have 
taken place without that terrible crippling of in- 
dustry which occurs when the whole manhood of 
a country is called from its work and put into the 
field, and which forces conscript countries to pay 
for their imports with gold and not exports. We 
can provide, not only the men but also the sinews 
of war, in continuous supply at the same time 
because of our Navy, and we are the only people 
who can. 

Again, sea power means not only the uneventful 
passage of our whole Expeditionary Force across to 
France ; it means also the bringing up of troops 
from the ends of thje earth— Colonials, Indians, yes, 
even Cossacks from Archangel, because, whether these 
particular troops were brought or not, the route was 
a perfectly possible one so long as our Navy held 
the seas. 

One other indirect result of our expenditure on the 
Navy is also interesting. These large sums are really 
in a sense an endowment of research. So important 
is it for the Navy to let no chance slip that the 
authorities often bring through their experimental and 
non-commercial stages a number of inventions like 
wireless telegraphy, turbines, and hardened steel, 
which later prove to be of incalculable value in in- 
dustry and commerce, but which might possibly never 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 219 

have reached the commercial stage but for the nursing 
of the Navy. The aeroplane, with all its possibilities 
of usefulness, has, nevertheless, been perfected for 
war. 

All this— and it is a very great deal— is to the 
good, but it is not all ; and our mistake — a mistake 
that is costing us and Europe dear— has been to 
imagine that we need not think, as it were, behind 
our Navy. The result is that our Army has always 
been small ; that its movements, therefore, have 
usually been of necessity slow and cautious. We 
fought Napoleon's troops— not Napoleon himself— 
in Spain. But what are the outstanding features of 
much of the Peninsular War? A great retreat fought 
by Sir John Moore to Corunna and a stubborn wait- 
ing by Wellington behind the lines of Torres Vedras 
—the very farthest limit of Portuguese territory— for 
better times. It becomes clear, then, that sea power 
cannot finish off any particular work— it is simply 
pressure. Like the retiarius in the gladiatorial con- 
tests, its trident cannot deal a death-blow, and 
another weapon is needed. We have, it is true, such 
a weapon of fine temper and quality in our standing 
Army ; but, though terribly sharp, it is not long 
enough : it is a dirk, and we need a sabre. The 
knowledge abroad that we had ready the million men 
whom Lord Kitchener has got together at last would 
have stopped the very idea of war last July, though 
even that million would not have been sufficient to 
keep the Germans out of Belgian soil if they had been 
determined to enter. 

And thus we are brought face to face with the 
problem which, despite the warnings of Lord Roberts, 
who died in harness in mid-November, we have been 
blinking at for all these years— the problem of com- 
pulsory military service. 

Some people affect to believe that we alone of 
all the European States are without a system of 



220 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

national service ; but they are quite wrong. The 
Militia Ballot Act is still on our Statute Book (in 
1808-15 a11 men between 18 and 45, except eldest 
sons, were called out under it, in spite of the sea 
power Trafalgar had given us in 1805) ; and the 
right of the State to call Englishmen to the 
colours is as untouched and clear as it was in the 
days of the Fyrd, the Feudal System, and the Press 
Gang. 

We have, indeed, seen already that there is no such 
thing as freedom against the State ; all the freedom 
we enjoy, in spite of Rousseau and the Contrat 
Social, is the residuum which the State need not 
take for itself. If, then, compulsory military ser- 
vice is not usual in England, the reason is to be 
found in the fact that for the time being the State 
does not feel obliged to insist on its rights in this 
matter. 

Nevertheless, there is no harm in realizing what 
some form of compulsion might mean to us. 
Probably our military needs would never compel 
us to stop our whole national and industrial life, 
as is the result of French or German mobiliza- 
tion ; yet, without shutting down most of the 
works and factories, a larger number of soldiers 
might well be forthcoming than is the case at 
present. 

One of the worst defects of our present industrial 
system is the blind alley— the employment which 
draws boys fresh from school into boys* work for a 
few years and then, when they are beginning to reach 
man's estate and ask for a man's wages, discharges 
them in favour of boys fresh from school. A youth 
thus discharged is practically shipwrecked at the 
beginning of his career. Without a trade, he finds 
himself, when nearly twenty, seeking, often in vain, 
for some rough, unskilled work to do. Failing again 
and again, he drops through the ranks of the un- 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 221 

employed on to the ever-growing waste-heap of the 
unemployable. 

We do not propose to discuss the wisdom or the 
ethics of letting employers grow rich by such a 
criminal waste of the nation's manhood. It would 
have been regarded as treason in the days of Chatham 
and the Mercantile System. But accepting it as a 
sad fact, what better fate can befall a youth at the 
end of the blind alley — which a purblind State ought 
never to have allowed him to enter — than to be 
picked up by an organization which will give him 
discipline and traditions, renew and! continue his 
education, perhaps teach him a trade, and after a few 
years send him forth again, fresh, not from school 
but from that rough-and-ready equivalent of a 
people's University — the Army? It is, of course, 
largely from the blind alley that the Army already 
under our existing voluntary system draws its men. 
The extension of the Army might, then, still further 
diminish this particular evil. 

But the evil ought to be swept away on its own 
grounds : to maintain the blind alley as an avenue 
into the Army is the maddest of logic. If, then, 
we can imagine a statesmanship sufficiently en- 
lightened and powerful to abolish the blind alley in 
face of the opposition of all those interests which, 
like the newspapers and the distributing agencies, 
flourish on this particular abuse, what would be the 
position of national service? Stronger than ever. 
For, in the absence of a stratum of our manhood 
pressed by want rather than patriotism into the ranks 
of the Army, and not, therefore, representative of 
even our average population, our citizens would then 
have to shoulder their own rifles and no longer play 
the risky and unworthy part of the mercenary-hiring 
Carthaginian faced with the martial and patriotic 
Roman, who, in spite of earlier defeats, ultimately 
sowed the site of Carthage with salt. 



222 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

They say that one volunteer is worth I forget how 
many pressed men, but nobody can say that the 
present war has indicated lack of fighting qualities in 
conscripts. Of course, a long-service, professional 
Army like our own, even though its sources of supply 
in ordinary times are not the highest, seems to have 
a finish, a slickness about it, a pride in the perfect 
command of its weapons, which gives it an advan- 
tage over the more wholesale forces of the 
Continent ; and undoubtedly our regimental system, 
with the intense enthusiasm it generates, is an in- 
stitution of kindred nature, in which we have a very 
decided pull over the featureless masses of continental 
infantry. When the Irish Guards achieved their first 
battle honours they were evidently annoyed, it is 
said, at the congratulations of the older regiments 
with many battles on their standards (names chiefly 
French and Russian, be it noted, and none of them 
German). Still more striking, perhaps, was the effect 
of the success of our first Territorial battalion to 
reach the firing-line — the London Scottish. 

But all this advantage of regimental pride would 
be retained under another method of recruiting and 
its advantages still further spread with larger numbers 
of recruits more representative of English manhood. 

One defect of our existing system has struck me 
particularly of late, but it is one which I touch on 
with some degree of apprehension, because I may be 
so easily misunderstood. It is this : the call of the 
country appeals more instantly to the finer and more 
imaginative among our young men than it does to 
that more stockish type which forms the bulk of 
our recruits in ordinary times, and constitutes the 
real personnel of the British Army. Now it has 
occurred to me whether this bringing of fire and 
enthusiasm in large proportions into our Army is 
exactly what our drill-sergeants and others require 
to work up into our traditional battalions ; but 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 223 

whether this be so or not, I am quite sure of this : 
that many a youth whose training and talents are of 
the greatest prospective value to the community is 
taking a place which would be just as well — perhaps 
even better — filled by some lounger at the street- 
corner whose imagination has not yet been fired. 
A universal system would stop this terribly wasteful 
skimming-off of the sensitives. They would be found 
in their right proportion, they would not be exempt ; 
but the voluntary system in war-time, when enlisting 
motives are suddenly reversed, practically exempts 
the very people who would be best in the Army 
by drawing in through its appeal to the higher 
motives those who are a very precious sacrifice to 
the brutality of war — the leaven needed in the peace 
which follows war to leaven the whole. The War 
Office has told schoolmasters in charge of Officers' 
Training Corps that they are to stay in England, 
training up the officers of the future. " They also 
serve who only stay and teach " ; and it is significant 
that Lord Kitchener's brother is a schoolmaster. The 
German teachers were called up only towards the end 
of October. Perhaps we might even suggest that 
some who rush into the ranks might be serving their 
country more faithfully in their accustomed pursuits, 
especially if they are in public services whose 
dislocation in war-time might well be fatal. But this 
is dangerous ground, and a universal system would 
keep us off it altogether. At present the position 
is this : An Englishman has the right to choose j 
but if he decides not to enlist he is faced with a 
certain amount of odium, and this is unfair and un- 
satisfactory. Under a voluntary system it is not 
easy to reject those who unwisely volunteer ; but 
under universal service each man would serve where 
he was most needed, not where he was most anxious 
to be, and would, moreover, be relieved from the 
ambiguity of the present system. Professor Cramb, 



224 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

whose book on Germany reveals his admiration of 
our enemy's thoroughness, nevertheless says of 
England: " Even now, in 191 3, when I consider 
England and this vast and complex fabric of Empire 
which she has slowly reared, its colonies, its de- 
pendencies, the cosmic energy which everywhere 
seems to animate the mass in its united life and in its 
separate States and principalities, all comparison with 
decaying empires appears an irrelevance or a futility. 
Whatever be England's fate, it will not be the fate 
of Venice or Byzantium, and as a proof of the validity 
of this impression or this conclusion I seem to discern 
everywhere stirrings as of a new life, to hear the 
tramp of armies fired by a newer chivalry than 
that of Crecy, and on the horizon to discern the 
outline of fleets manned by as heroic a resolve as 
those of Nelson or Rodney/' 

And how, then, shall we envisage our own national 
share of the war over and above the actual fighting? 
By as careful and thorough a study of the facts 
as we can make, by the thinking out of our ideas 
relative to a settlement, and by such an understanding 
of our Allies that no amount of German insinuation 
can disturb our faith in them. We are linked on the 
one hand with the master-mind and pioneer of 
European civilization — how many of us realize, I won- 
der, the greatness of Rodin's gift of twenty master- 
pieces to England? — and on the other with the great 
dreamer and Christian mystic who, in his turn, links 
Europe with the east. All we can do in such com- 
pany is humbly to try and understand our brothers- 
in-arms (no easy business for our island-cramped 
wits) and to polish our own powers — naturally con- 
siderable — into comparative brightness. Opposed to 
us we have the serried ranks of Germany, which 
have marched to victory not only on the battlefield 
of arms but on many a field of science and art, where 
we, as a people, have played too often only the part 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 225 

of camp-followers, largely because our prophets were 
not without honour save in their own native England. 
Already a change for the better has begun, and 
unless the war fills us with an immense self-conceit 
and an indolent self- righteousness, the movement of 
the English heart and mind to a greater appreciation 
of its own real achievements in the past, and then of 
those of other peoples, will have been stimulated 
by our present crisis. But the effort really to throw 
off our numbing indifference must be severe. I 
happen to live in Sheffield, and any one would think 
that, since the Powers all come to Sheffield for the 
guns and the armour which are the instruments of 
their policy, interest in foreign politics would be at 
their keenest in the steel city. But the fact is far 
otherwise. By a wise dispensation of Providence, the 
human eye is furnished with a blind spot in the 
retina where the sensitiveness is so great that other- 
wise the whole sight might be endangered. So it 
is with Sheffield. It is the blind spot in the inter- 
national eye, and perhaps it is as well that the men 
at work in its gun-yards do not strike whenever 
called upon to work on a job for a customer whose 
politics they disapprove. 

Nevertheless we must cultivate knowledge and use 
it as a basis for our judgments. I have more than 
once suggested a Professor of Foreign Politics as an 
adjunct to the technical or business side of the 
Sheffield University — a sort of weather-cock to show 
how the wind is blowing abroad and who might be 
pressed to buy cruisers and guns in view of possi- 
bilities in the near future. But I really do feel now 
that our national ignorance of foreign affairs is a 
matter too serious to continue any longer, and far 
too serious to joke about. 

If we are to have our say, to express our views, 
whether they be those of Mr. Churchill as to settle- 
ment on racial lines or whether we favour an ex- 

15 



226 THE WAR: ITS ORIGINS AND WARNINGS 

tension of democracy in Germany, we must make 
inquiries, as we say, and get to know. Only then 
can we make our convictions, probably not glowing, 
but rather water-cooled, like our own Maxim guns' 
known to our immediate rulers and so to the world 
at large. This is our great duty to ourselves and 
to humanity : to fight to a finish and then to see that 
the great, mild principles we have applied to the 
building up of our own Empire receive their full 
weight in the counsels of Europe when the time comes 
for a full settlement. No partial patching-up must 
be thought of : that way lies war upon war in an 
unending vista. 

Professor Marcks said in Berlin on October 26th 
(what a part these professors have played in the 
war !) : " This war is no misunderstanding, no in- 
trigue : it is an eruption of deadly enmity. It must 
be. The past and the future are at stake. We 
had to assert ourselves in the world or cease to 
exist. The world-nation is manifesting itself. It is 
we [Germany] who are the hero and object of this 
war ; we are also its cause : for we have ceased not 
to be." 

This is the spirit which made Krupp give a million 
and a half to the German relief funds as soon as 
war broke out in anticipation of distress, not in 
response to it. Krupp alone thus beat even the 
million Moscow gave to the Russian Fund. No such 
figures appear in our Prince of Wales' Fund list. 
The same spirit stirred the German women to force 
their jewellery on the German Treasury officials. A 
similar sacrifice is recorded of English women— to 
release Richard Coeur de Lion from captivity in the 
twelfth century ! The number of German volunteers is 
as great as the whole of our new armies, and that in 
addition to the conscripts, to each of whom the Crown 
Prmce of Bavaria has given a copy of Jugend's 
Hate Song " against England. 



ENGLAND AND SEA POWER 227 

I will conclude with just one verse of this song :— 

Come, let us stand at the judgment place 
An oath to swear to, face to face, 
An oath of bronze no wind can shake, 
An oath for our sons and their sons to take. 
Come, hear the word, repeat the word, 
Throughout the Fatherland make it heard. 

And then follows the terrible chorus. 

Of a truth, it is right and necessary to learn 
from the enemy. Our sea -given privileges carry 
their responsibilities . 



THE END 



UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS. WOKING AND LONDON 



Selected from George Allen and Unwinds List 



The Diplomatic History 
of the War 

11 Includes a Diary of negotiations and events in the different 
capitals, the texts of the official documents of the various Govern- 
ments, the public speeches in the European Parliaments, an account 
of the military preparations, etc. An invaluable reference book for 
all writers and speakers on the war."— Globe. 

"This work may fairly claim to be the most complete historical 

account yet published of the events leading up to the war 

will be an inestimable treasure."— Standard. 

Edited by M. P. PRICE, M.A. 

Medium 8vo, Cloth. 7/# g^ ne ^ 



The British Empire and 
the United States 

A Review of their Relations during the century 
of peace following the Treaty of Ghent. 

By WILLIAM ARCHIBALD DUNNING, 
Ph.D., LL.D. 

With an Introduction by the Right Hon. VISCOUNT 
BRYCE, O.M., and a Preface by Nicholas Murray Butler, 
LL.D., D.C.L., President of the Columbia University. 

8w > Cloth ' 8,. 6d. net. 



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